


It Could Be Sunshine

by Ywain Penbrydd (penbrydd)



Series: Vexation of Spirit [13]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV), Shadow Unit, The Lone Gunmen (TV)
Genre: Background Het, Canon-Typical Badly-Injured Reid, Canon-Typical Sucks to be Chaz, Chaz is shit at relationships, Everything is way more complicated than strictly necessary, Family Secrets, Injury Recovery, M/M, Polyamory, Reid isn't a hell of a lot better, Self-Doubt, Smut, Virtual Reality, open mouth;insert foot, television quality depictions of hacking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-02-27 17:37:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 49,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18743836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penbrydd/pseuds/Ywain%20Penbrydd
Summary: Langly has a cousin, or so they think. Under other circumstances, his wariness might be dismissed as paranoia, but who is this Nebraskan forensic pathologist, really? And how does Chaz intend to deal with the fact that he made a pass at the cousin of one of the men he's sleeping with, knowing damn well that was exactly what he was doing?





	1. Chapter 1

They'd gone back to Reid's finally, after another round of explanations of what had happened at Colonel West's, of how Reid had gotten shot, of how a valued Air Force officer had just happened to agree to confess to his crimes on video. This was, Reid suspected, another one of those things that would haunt the remains of his career. At least he hadn't been fired, yet. Maybe the Bureau would be good enough to wait until he could consistently feel both his hands, again. For now, he was on medical leave, Chaz was on administrative leave, and Garcia was trying to reassure them both that they'd brought back more than enough evidence that no one in their right mind could dispute the necessity of the arrest, and the speed with which that last day's events had been planned and executed. The man had admitted to abducting no less than two government employees and a handful of citizens, before hiring assassins to take out the task force investigating him and any potential witnesses to past misdeeds. There was no way, Garcia assured them, that they'd be in trouble for anything but getting Reid shot.  
  
And that, Reid could agree, was both a problem and his own fault. He and Chaz had been working with different priorities, and neither of them had realised the other wasn't watching their backs, until he took a bullet in his. They'd work on that.  
  
But, now, he sat in the chair Langly had bought him, all those months ago, with the vibrations turned on for his legs, but not his back. He still couldn't take the risk with his back, for a few more days, but the prognosis was optimistic. He'd be fine, barring any further trauma. They just had to wait for the bruising to pass and his vertebrae to settle back into place. Like whiplash, the doctor had said, but lower. And there were a hundred arguments Reid could have made about that explanation, but none of them would have gotten him out of that room any faster, so he'd inclined his head in the way that had temporarily replaced nodding, and that was that.  
  
Langly sat at Reid's desk, laptop open before him, and a box of Chinese food in one hand, a pile of empties sitting next to the screen, and Reid had to make an effort not to say something about that, not to get up and throw them in the bin. Chaz watched him, amused, from just past the extended footrest of the chair, where he'd pulled up one of the reading chairs that were actually of a size that was probably almost comfortable for Reid, but were still a little short for him.  
  
"So, we're safe here, right?" Chaz asked Langly, passing a box of orange chicken to Reid.  
  
"Anything that gets in is going to be pretty obvious, now that we've replaced the locks. I really want to get construction started next door, so we only have to worry about one wall. The longer that place sits empty, the more likely some asshole's going to try to drill through the wall." Langly rolled his eyes. "I know that. It's what I'd do, in Bollinger's shoes."  
  
"Bollinger's an idiot, if he actually thinks he can spin public opinion, _now_. As long as Asher's case is going well, I'm a national hero wounded in the line of duty." Reid rubbed his fingers along the plastic fork, making sure he could feel them, before he took a bite. "And I hate it."  
  
"You got shot in the back. I'd hate it, too." Langly flicked his fingers and another article on Asher's testimony from the day before opened on his screen.  
  
"That's not what I meant. I had a nice, quiet life. I wasn't anyone important. And more than that, I'm still not."  
  
"Look, I get that you've got some kind of compulsion toward humility, but we just saved the damn country, Reid." Langly rolled his eyes again.  
  
"You know, if you roll your eyes any harder, you're going to sprain something." Chaz nodded and swallowed. "True fact. It's a real thing."  
  
"Only in people who lack the muscle tone," Reid joked, the amusement not quite making it onto his face. "It's like training for the Olympics."  
  
"We're going to be arguing about Helmsman for months, in front of a whole lot of people we're hoping will make sure he doesn't do this again, and nobody else gets any bright ideas about repeating his decisions." Chaz reached for another bag of egg rolls."Spencer doesn't want to be famous. I don't want to be famous. New subject time. What are we doing about your cousin?"  
  
"What is this I hear about you taking her on a _date_?" Langly shot back. "I mean, I know, we're Langlys; we're irresistible to people who obviously need glasses, but what the _hell_ , Villette?"  
  
"She's an attractive, single woman, close to my age, and she's smart. And, you know, Spencer's got you, and..." Chaz shrugged eloquently.  
  
"And you wanted one for yourself?" Langly sounded a little less than impressed. "I mean, I can't blame you. But, you can't share her with us. With me. That is not going to happen, evil twins thing aside."  
  
"I wouldn't try. I mean, that's..." Chaz almost ran a hand through his hair, and then reached for a napkin, instead. "I didn't really think this through. But, I like her. I haven't thought about anyone like that in years."  
  
"Hey." Langly waited until Chaz looked at him. "I'm not making you pick. Just, you know, only one of us _at a time_."  
  
"She still doesn't know you exist, Langly," Reid reminded him. "This isn't going to go well at all, if we don't ... do something about that. You have to make a decision about how to approach this. We could tell her you're dead. We could tell her you're Frank Arroway. But, if Chaz is serious, she's going to be in a room with you, eventually, and we're ... honestly, you look enough alike that I think we're going to have a problem."  
  
"DNA test," Langly said, after a moment spent chewing and staring into space. "She's looking for me, right? Or she thinks someone's still looking for me, which, let's be honest, someone probably is, and I'd really rather they not find me. But, the DNA on file for 'Richard Langly' isn't _mine_. And there are less than ten people in the world who know that, and you've met six of them, including me and yourselves. So, we don't test her against Cousin Dick. We test her against _me_. And then, if she's actually related to me... you can tell her you found me. But, you can't tell her in any way that can be traced. I don't want anyone getting this. I don't want to find out Bollinger's hijacking signal with Narcisse's tools, and there's suddenly proof."  
  
"There's going to be proof in the test results," Reid pointed out.  
  
"No, there's going to be proof she has a living relative. We're not the kind of close where anyone's going to be able to prove _which_ relative I am. I'm a cousin. I might be an uncle, at that distance. I might be from some totally other branch of the family that lost the name because it was all daughters. Tell her I'm in Witness Protection or something, and if she says anything I'll disappear again." Langly shrugged. "At the worst, we can spin it. 'See, this is why everyone thinks I'm this Richard Langly guy. I'm his third cousin, and we look alike.' Besides, I pick the lab, and we run the samples anonymously. There's no easy way to link that back to either of us."  
  
"Why even go to the trouble?" Reid asked, catching the fork in the container as it slipped out of his fingers again. "Why do you need the proof? You know who you are. You know who she is..."  
  
"No, I know who she _says_ she is. Right now, that's not good enough for me. I know she's got a really Norwegian face, and that's also not good enough for me. Look, I read the reports. No living family, only one friend, single? Went away to college and came back with a job in law enforcement?"  
  
"Not technically law enforcement," Chaz said, around another mouthful. "It's Nebraska. Forensic pathologists aren't called in until something really weird happens, and even then, it's the coroner's choice. And the coroner's a lawyer, not a doctor. I have no idea who designed the system, but it makes _my_ job more difficult."  
  
Reid flexed his fingers and rolled his shoulders. "She works for the University of Nebraska's infectious diseases response team, out of Omaha, but she's on long-term loan to York General, doing research into local epidemiology. She also just happens to be friends with the coroner, so when four weird bodies showed up in corn fields, nepotism to the rescue."  
  
Chaz blinked in surprise.  
  
"I read her last seven articles on the flight back to Virginia. I think she's onto something with the cow parasites." Reid gestured with the hand that almost worked. "Anyway, from anyone else, I'd think this was paranoia, but seeing as I've been through two cases in the last nine months involving people extremely invested in killing you, I'm willing to take this caution at face value. If she's not related to you, we tell her she doesn't match the sample we have, so we haven't found her cousin after all. Or we just show her the death certificate."  
  
"We don't tell her we have a living source." Chaz wiped his fingers off and leaned back in a way that made the wood of the chair squeak, and he shot an apologetic look at Reid. "We tell her we have a sample from what might be her cousin, and we need a relative to match it against. We have _evidence_ , not a person. We might be able to tell her what _happened_ to Cousin Dick."  
  
"And if she matches, what happened to Cousin Dick is that he's living under the watchful eye of the hottest feds in the history of the government." Langly nodded slowly. "Otherwise, there's that grave in Arlington that got dug up by Narcisse."  
  
"A plausible alternate source for the sample, since it's recently been disturbed in connection with one of our cases." Reid attempted to eat, again, this time with somewhat more success. "So, how do we present the idea, and when?"  
  
"And how hard is Dr Langly going to kick Agent Villette's ass when she finds out what's going on here?" Chaz groaned, sliding down in the chair and staring at the ceiling.  
  
Reid sighed. "I told you it was a bad idea."  
  
"I knew it was a bad idea, but I've never been any good at this. I don't know what I was thinking, except that it probably ended in a white picket fence. At least this one's not a serial killer."  
  
"That you know of," Reid pointed out. "She really is well positioned for it."  
  
"You're an ass."  
  
"Not unless you're a French whore," Reid retorted, absently, attention mostly on the fork in his hand.  
  
Langly blinked. "I am missing so much context, but I'm totally sure that was funny as hell."  
  
"It wasn't," Chaz muttered, getting up to put on another pot of coffee.


	2. Chapter 2

Chaz was procrastinating. He knew he was procrastinating, and it didn't make a damn bit of difference. He was off another three days, at least, so that he and Reid would come back at the same time, and he knew he could afford to fly back to York, to actually see Mary again. But, it wouldn't be a good idea. It would be better if he didn't see her again, until they knew. It would be better if he picked up the phone and called her, so they could get this over with.  
  
Instead, he went to the fridge and got another beer.  
  
He was mooning, and he knew it. Or maybe he was sulking. The circumstances made it somewhat harder to determine, but his stomach had crawled up into his throat and he thought he might vomit his heart onto the back patio. It was stupid, and he knew it. He'd barely met the woman, but that was how it went, with him. First date, head over heels, and then something went wrong. Something always went wrong. And so, he'd tried _not doing that_. And it had worked for a while, and then it had failed horribly, so he tried again, and this time, it was worse. This time it was even more absurd than the last, though he'd credit himself that he hadn't slept with her, yet, which was something.  
  
He'd been easy for a long time. Made it easier to pretend. Made it easier to believe. Made it easier to pick someone who was just looking for a good time, instead of the ones that gave him chest pains just to look at. he'd taught himself to get by on whatever fell into his lap, and to make sure he was gone before he could think too hard about it. For the most part, it had worked pretty well. Better than just giving up entirely.  
  
And then there was whatever this was, with Reid and Langly. Which was very much a 'whatever'. He had no idea what to do with it, but as long as Reid would let him stay, he'd keep it. And really, if he were a lesser man, he'd blame Reid for this ... thing, with Mary. Obsession, if he were honest with himself. But, that part of himself he'd so long kept contained, held at bay, had reared up again, at the gut-wrenching ache of Reid's love for Langly. And even now, it was still pain, and it brought him some small comfort that Reid really wasn't any better at being in love than he was. Maybe a little more successful, but not better. And if more successful, only very recently.  
  
But, it still brought back memories of the dreams he'd left behind in Texas, the life he'd thought he could have, before he turned. He thought he'd lost everything, but really, he'd only lost the things that would hurt the most. He'd only lost the last illusions of self and a happy ending. It had been a long time since he'd let himself imagine any of that. But, he knew what he felt belonged to Reid. It was just another reflection. He wasn't in love with Langly, however much it felt like it, when Reid smiled in that way he only did when Langly was, well, doing any number of typically Langly things.  
  
But, Mary... the idea that he could feel that way about Mary, the suggestion that she might even welcome that sort of attention from someone like him...  
  
It was a nightmare in disguise. These things never had happy endings, and this one was an absolute set-up for failure.  
  
Still. He had to call her. And he probably had to call her between the second and third beer, or it wasn't going to happen. He'd just keep drinking and sulking until he passed out into his own self-loathing, which wasn't something that happened often, but he knew himself well enough to see when an occasion called for it. And speaking of setting himself up, he'd sure as hell set himself up for this one.  
  
He finished his beer, took the phone out of his pocket, and stared at it, remembering the unending concern about tapped phones and theoretical Langlys, and that those same concerns were now all the more rational, in light of the task force's sudden fame.  
  
On the other hand, Hafs had been trying to avoid his sulking all night, and just maybe she'd do him a favour, if she thought it might make the sulking stop. He didn't have to tell her it wouldn't help. He could just do the polite thing and shut himself in his room for the rest of the night, with the bag of strawberry creams and the rest of the beer. Maybe he'd feel human in the morning. Probably not, though.  
  
He wanted to make this call, he reminded himself, as he forced himself up the stairs. He just wanted it to be a very different call. He wanted to call to say he was coming out for the weekend with nothing better to do than hit the Friday Fish Fry and maybe go dancing. And he knew an offer like that would not end in fish or dancing, unless the naked tango counted. But, he couldn't do it. He had to solve a thirty-year-old disappearance, first, and then tell the girl of his entirely literal recent dreams that he was in some kind of polyamorous relationship with her cousin. And that led to another question -- if it came to that, would he excuse himself from that relationship to be with her? It was, he decided, an idiotic question, because it wasn't going to come to that. She was going to kick his ass and tell him to lose her number. And he deserved no less.  
  
Hafidha's door was closed, but the hall was still filled with the sounds of a Joy Division album. Chaz leaned his head on the door and knocked solidly, feeling the impact against the wood resonate through his skull. "Hafs, I need you to help me do something crazy."  
  
"No, you don't," she called back. "You're crazy enough without my help."  
  
"You're a fucking riot. I'm serious, though. It's kind of important."  
  
"Are you crying?"  
  
"I'm not crying."  
  
"Are you lying to me?"  
  
"Not yet."  
  
The door swung open and Chaz caught himself with one hand on the door frame, offering the most utterly miserable excuse for a smile, as Hafidha stared up at him expectantly.  
  
"What do you want, Charles?"  
  
"Ouch." He held up his hands and stepped back, leaving one foot in the door.  
  
"Not as ouch as you're about to get if you don't start talking. I had to put clothes on."   
  
"Okay, okay, I need you to help me make a phone call. Securely. Between Bollinger and the buzzards with cameras hanging around the Asher-West thing, Frank's worried somebody's going to pick up something they shouldn't, which is definitely the conversation I'm about to have with Dr Langly," Chaz explained, wondering if that sounded as bizarre to Hafs as it did to him. Legitimate, but bizarre.  
  
"Whoa, back up the bus. _Doctor_ Langly? There's another one of them?" Hafidha's eyes narrowed. "And you've been sulking for days. And you keep telling me Down the Hall and the rich boyfriend didn't break up with you, but that's a breakup sulk and don't tell me it's not, I've watched you do this how many times? You found another one. He's from Nebraska. You were just in Nebraska. ... You're an _idiot_!"  
  
"I am, in fact, an idiot," Chaz agreed, nodding. "I still have to make this call."  
  
"Gotta be a girl, if you're getting stupid. Why are you calling her if she broke up with you? You've never been that kind of desperate." Hafidha reached out and patted his arm. "Don't start now."  
  
"She didn't break up with me. That's ... she's going to. I mean, if we were dating, she _would_. But, we're not. I might like to be, but we're not, and she's ... not going to, after this." Chaz squeezed his eyes shut and sighed, and Hafidha finally opened the door all the way, rolling her eyes and gesturing him into the room.  
  
"If you sit down, are you going to start making more sense, or is putting pressure on your ass going to cut off the blood flow to your brain?"  
  
He threw himself onto the corner of her bed and buried his face in his hands, elbows on his knees, and took a few long breaths. "We thought she might be a serial killer. York was our case, not theirs, and there's me completely by accident. And there's the local forensic pathologist who's had her hands all over the bodies. She fit a decent bit of the profile and the evidence, at a glance, and we know she's got an anomalous relative, and we don't know if he was born beta, because we didn't know -- _he_ didn't know. So, I went for a closer look."  
  
"Like you do. Oh, Chazzie, let me guess -- smart, pretty, eats like food was invented for her?" Hafidha rolled out her desk chair and dropped into it, turning down the music with a flick of her fingers.  
  
"Two out of three. She's not anomalous."  
  
"Disappointed?"  
  
Chaz shoved his forehead down against his palms, fingers twisting and clenching in his hair. "A little," he finally admitted. "And what does that say about me?"  
  
"You want someone like you, just like everyone else in the world." It was the kind of sentence that could've been sympathetic, out of someone else. "So, what, a one-night stand, you got her number, and now you actually have to call?"  
  
"I didn't sleep with her. I'm... something her cousin. Who she's sort of looking for, in the most half-assed possible way. And now he knows and she doesn't, and I have to set it up so we find out if she's really his cousin -- and Spencer nailed that one. Anyone else and the suspicion she might not be would be straight up paranoia. Him? Too many coincidences, too many assassins." Chaz looked up. "And now I have to call her and ask for a DNA sample. Imply we've got a sample that might be her cousin, but we need someone to compare it to, to be sure. She doesn't know he's dead, yet. Well, 'dead'. I don't know if it would be better or worse if she did."  
  
"Yeah, that could go either way. Don't think too hard about it. That way lies madness. More madness. Deeper waters of nuttery than you're already up to your neck in." Hafidha nodded slowly, staring into space. "So, you want me to get you a secure line, so no one finds out you're calling the last living Langly for a DNA sample that you're not going to get in the usual way nubile young women contribute saliva and skin cells to you."  
  
"Hafs? Have you considered that getting laid might help you think about my sex life a little less?"  
  
"Touché, baby brother. Give me your phone. We have a call to make."  
  
"Do you even actually need it?" Chaz asked, leaning back to get the phone out of his pocket.  
  
"No, but you probably need to be holding it when the other end starts ringing." Hafidha grinned and tugged it out of his hand. "Besides, it's still less effort if I'm actually holding one of the devices in question. You got her number in here?"  
  
"Absolutely not. Can't trust it, so..." Chaz recited the number from memory, a sign of how long he'd spent just staring at it, trying to figure out how he was going to handle this, whether he was just going to completely ignore Reid's concerns and his own better judgement and try for something he knew better than to even consider. He imagined trying to convince Falkner to transfer him to the office in Lincoln, something about faster response times to anomalous concerns in the Midwest. She'd never buy it, and he'd never do it. He'd carved out this niche for himself with his bare hands, and now he _couldn't_ leave it. Not that he much wanted to. Yet.  
  
What was it about this woman that made him think he could be happy? The conclusion was ridiculous, and if he didn't know himself so well, he'd be thinking they had another Holly on their hands. He should have been happy with what he had, but they belonged to each other, not to him. And they were both so careful not to lead him on -- he appreciated that, respected it.  And Mary Langly seemed to be a similar type -- smart, funny, a little weird, exactly the sort of thing he was into, if he was honest with himself. And she was single. Self-contained. No other attachments. Which should have worried him, but she also wasn't looking to fill the gap in her life. As far as she was concerned there wasn't one, but there was definitely room for a little more fun, and he'd be thrilled to provide it.  
  
And why was this different to what he had, then?  
  
He came back to his senses when Hafidha tapped the phone against his forehead.  
  
"Take it before it starts ringing."  
  
He swallowed hard, nodding, as he took back the phone. "Thanks."  
  
The click and hiss of an actual answering machine surprised him, and the disconnected line tone surprised him even more. Another second passed, and then, "Still there? Well, leave a message, I guess."  
  
"Ah, Dr Langly? It's Agent Villette. I didn't lose your number; things have just been a little ... busy, here. Thought I'd--"  
  
There was another click as the phone picked up and a weird echoey snap when the tape stopped. "A little busy? Are you kidding me? Do you think we don't get news in Nebraska?" Mary laughed, and Chaz thought she sounded just like her cousin. "CNN's been flashing your face every hour or so. You and Reid and that Arroway guy -- that's the boyfriend, right? Yeah, I can see why Reid was a little distracted."  
  
Shit. This was going to be more difficult than he'd thought. "Well, you know how it is, promise you're going to call someone, and suddenly you're saving the world. I had to get help to get a secure line to call you at all. The phones are a little... ah..."  
  
"Yeah, after something like that... I'd say the feds are probably listening, but you _are_ the feds."  
  
The way Hafidha leaned in, elbows on her knees, chin in her hands, told Chaz she was definitely listening.  
  
"There's other kinds of feds, too. I'm pretty sure the Department of Justice and the Department of Defence are going to be up my ass by the end of the week." Chaz laughed nervously. "But, there's not a lot I can say about that. The news can tell you more than I can. This is just the first chance I've had to sit down for longer than it takes to fill out more forms in days, so I figured I'd use it to give you a call."  
  
"Ooh, flattery! I like it."  
  
Chaz could hear the smile in Mary's voice, could remember what it looked like on her face.  
  
"So, you just calling to tell me it's going to be a while before you can call me, because of all this shit on tv?"  
  
The urge to say yes was strong. "Actually, I'm calling because I took an interest when you mentioned your cousin, and I made some calls that _weren't_ better made sitting down. There's a DNA sample available that's never been matched, but circumstantially it probably belongs to Richard Langly. If I could get a sample from a living relative to compare it to, we might be able to tell you where we last saw your cousin."  
  
"The FBI has samples that might be Dick? That's... What'd he _do_?"  
  
Chaz made an agonised sound. "That's really the question, isn't it? I couldn't say, until we're sure. But, I can tell you he was alive and well in the Baltimore area, back in the nineties. That's where things get a little fuzzy, but if we can prove you're related to this sample..."  
  
"You'll be able to tell where he was, after that." There was a long pause. "If I do this, is it going to open him to prosecution, if he's still alive?"  
  
"No. That's the easy one to answer. Any crimes he may have been suspected of, he was --" Chaz cleared his throat, trying to hide a laugh. "-- arrested during the commission of. And it was nothing on our level. A couple drunk in publics, a few really weird ones with some corporate-industrial B&E, a couple things I'm not sure about but they look like they might be pirate radio? It's the rap sheet of your average low-grade nineties counterculture revolutionary. I can promise you the FBI doesn't want him for anything, and I don't see any pending charges from anyone else at the national level. If anybody wants him, it's probably for parking violations in East Dingleshit, Minnesota."  
  
"Yeah, that sounds like Dick. There's still stories about him, up in Saltville. Lot of people were glad when he disappeared." Another pause. "You want me to fly out, or can I overnight the sample to your lab? I know how to pack it. I do shit like this all the time. Oh, cheek swab or blood?"  
  
"Cheek swab should be enough. Let me get you the address of the lab we're using for this. You'd think we could run it in-house, but anything that's not a current case or a critically small sample gets outsourced, for the sake of speed. Still takes too fucking long, but a couple weeks, not six or eight months. I'll see if I'm cute enough to skip the line, but you've seen my face."  
  
"Hey, I like your face!"  
  
Chaz squeezed his eyes shut, trying to keep his breathing steady as he rattled off the name and address of the lab Langly had picked. This wasn't going to end well. He was going to break her heart... assuming she was at all invested in the proposed relationship. "I'm hoping the crew at the lab agree with you!"  
  
"If they do, more for you. If they don't, more for me. Either way, one of us comes out ahead of the game!"  
  
And Chaz knew that conclusion wasn't as casual as she made it sound. "I'll be lucky if they don't chase me out with brooms, when I drop off our sample. ... Agent Gates is making faces at me. I'll give you a call when I know something. Before then, if I can find five minutes and a payphone."  
  
A sharp laugh. "Payphone? Seriously?"  
  
"Hey, you're the one with the answering machine!"  
  
"Yeah, because I can't screen my calls properly with voicemail. Tapes are great." Mary made an awkward sound. "So, I'm guessing calling you is a bad idea, right now."  
  
"Yeah, I wouldn't call me. But, listen, maybe when the results come in, things might've calmed down a little..."  
  
"Nah, news like this? Months."  
  
"No, not calmed down enough for you to call, calmed down enough that I can get away for a few days."  
  
"You threatening to come visit me, Captain America?"  
  
" _Captain America?_ That-- no. I am... I know a guy you could probably compare to Steve Rogers, and it's not me." Chaz scoffed, shooting Hafs a horrified look. "But, maybe I'll visit. Or if the results come back positive and you want to take a tour of Baltimore or something, I could take the time. Costs the same to fly you here as it does to fly me there."  
  
"Oooh, bribery and flattery in the same conversation! Definitely getting to like you," Mary teased. "I'll leave you to your five minutes of dodging the press. The samples will go out tonight, should get to your lab by morning, if I can make the cutoff-- oh, yeah. It's still early. Give me a call when you have another five minutes, Special Agent Absolutely Not Steve Rogers."  
  
"Will do. Thanks." Chaz nodded at Hafidha, who closed the line.  
  
"I dunno, Chazzie. I could make the Steve Rogers thing work, with you..." Hafidha wiggled her fingers at him, leaning back in her chair.  
  
"Las Vegas in the eighties, and there's no super serum involved." Chaz mashed his hands against his face, one still clutching the phone, and tipped back onto the bed.  
  
"You're a gamma. I think the super serum's implied."  
  
"I'm not having this conversation. This? This is not a conversation I'm having."  
  
"Then get the hell off my bed, so I can get back into it." Hafidha waited for the long-suffering groan. "And don't roll over on my vibrator."


	3. Chapter 3

Forty-eight hours, the lab promised, and not because Chaz was cute, but because Frank Arroway called in some favours. The thing Langly had learned about being rich and investing in small businesses was that when you needed a small favour, like to skip the line every once in a great while, as long as you asked politely, you usually got what you wanted. Which left them with two days before the results came in. Two days of Chaz being, as Hafs put it, 'full cat on the ceiling'.  
  
So, he'd convinced Chaz to go get Reid and for the two of them to come back to his place, for the first time since they'd gotten back from Nebraska. A reminder that it was now mid-November and Langly still hadn't managed to come through with the birthday present he'd been hanging on to for Chaz might've helped, but that wouldn't have been enough on its own. No, he'd had to appeal to Chaz's ego -- he'd take out the cameras, but somebody still had to be able to drive well enough to ditch the reporters. And Reid was an especially hot subject, at the moment, having been featured in some filler fluff just a week or two before, and now either preserving or destroying the sanctity of the American government, depending on which side of that line you landed on. And for most of the papers, the combination with Asher's testimony and the sudden leak of some twenty-year-old test scenarios put them firmly in the 'preserving' column, though no one seemed quite sure what to do with Reid's unwillingness to be made a spectacle of.  
  
Bollinger had sold his suspicions to some larger rags, desperate for some dirty gossip about the latest American heroes, and Narcisse's accusations were splashed across the front page of countless tabloids with various unflattering images of Reid, most of them edited television stills in which he looked twelve, but at least one was what looked like a surveillance photo -- maybe one of Bollinger's -- showing a grim-faced and canny federal agent. And Langly knew that one would make the rounds once it got noticed. That wasn't the face of boy-genius-turned-hero. That was the face of a man who'd been through enough shit to replace his fear with resignation. That was the face Narcisse needed Reid to have.  
  
But, that was stable. Frohike was keeping an eye on the papers, handling the revelation to the press that Ken Fitzgerald's death was misreported -- that he'd been in critical condition when he was hauled out of the river, and at first, no one had thought he was alive. For a few more days, Frohike wrote in the press release, they hadn't wanted to announce his survival, both because they weren't sure he was going to make it and because the FBI had advised against it, until the assassin -- because it was very definitely a paid hit -- was in custody. Questions remained, it was written, over why Colonel West had ordered the murder of a local philanthropist.  
  
"Byers, get the door, but don't open it until I tell you. You don't want to be in Villette's way when he pulls in." Langly cut back in to the line he had open to Reid's phone, cutting cameras on four different paths through the city as he led the Twins down a route that had nearly none. Best way to hide was still to make a show of going somewhere else.  
  
"You're sleeping with both of them. They have first names," Byers sighed, getting the pistol from his desk drawer and snapping the cartridge into it, before he picked up his coffee and headed for the back.  
  
Langly muted himself, again. "So do you. When's the last time I called you 'John', and was I pissed when I did it? And when the literal and actual fuck have you ever called me anything but 'Langly'? I mean, other than that time you had a concussion, called me gorgeous, and then passed out, and we had to slap your feet until you woke up, so you wouldn't die. C'mon, Byers, we're a different kind of people, and you know that."  
  
He finally got out of his chair, following Byers toward the back, and stopped in the workroom to pick up the large, flat parcel wrapped in brown paper. It wasn't part of the original plan, but since Chaz had waited so long and so patiently, Langly figured the least he could do was throw in a little something to make up for the strain of knowing them. A reminder of the benefit, as if the other gift wasn't more of the same. Coffee was on, dinner was just waiting for him to turn on the oven -- and he was going to need dinner, after this.  
  
"See you at the gate. I'll open the door right before you hit it. Fitz'll meet you as you get in, but I don't want to take any chances."  
  
The cascade of expletives from Chaz was vivid, and vivid was a bad sign. He knew what Chaz was upset about, and he could almost sympathise. The number of entirely regrettable situations he'd walked into, over the years, with both eyes open and his fingers crossed behind his back... but, he'd never done it with a potential relationship. And he'd reassure Chaz, yet again, that he didn't actually care about the whole cousin thing, as long as it didn't happen in his bed, but he knew it wouldn't do any good. It wasn't _his_ reaction Chaz was worried about.  
  
He waited in the living room, sitting on the back of the couch, until Byers cleared them, downstairs. When he looked up again, it was to the sound of feet on the stairs.  
  
"Could you have cut that any closer?" Reid did not look impressed.  
  
Chaz laughed. "Yes. We could have. And now that I know it's possible, we probably will."  
  
"I was nowhere near hitting you with the door." Langly rolled his eyes. "Villette's right. There's a couple hundred milliseconds in there, and we could probably be taking better advantage of them, but I really didn't want to push the system too hard with you in the car."  
  
"Where the hell did you learn to drive like that?" Byers asked, bringing up the rear.  
  
"Mostly just took the defensive driving manuals and brought them up to the speed I'm usually actually moving." Chaz grinned over his shoulder. "And then added a few things, because nobody handles a car like I handle a car."  
  
"And it's probably for the best," Reid huffed, looking like he was still trying not to hyperventilate. Subtle, but a definite tension around the eyes and knuckles, now that Langly knew to look for it.  
  
"You okay, Agent Sexy?" Langly asked, holding out an arm in invitation. "How's your back?"  
  
"My back is... technically fine, all things considered. I'm recovering at a perfectly normal rate, no cause for concern." Reid rolled his hand dismissively as he crossed the room. "I still have to take another few days off. I don't want to, but that chair is going to kill me."  
  
"Possibly literally," Chaz reminded him, and Reid rolled his eyes and put his arms around Langly.  
  
"If you'll excuse me, I have to go stop Frohike from turning us into the Avengers, in the next press release." Byers closed the door and re-sealed it. "But, given the tabloids, lately..."  
  
"We'll get it nailed down, Byers. I think we're doing all right. Legitimate press loves what we've done with the whole thing, they absolutely adore Reid, and there's this whole back-office geniuses turn hero vibe they're spinning, which is absolute shit, but I'll let them have it. It's not our fault they don't seem to get what 'field agent' actually means."  
  
"We don't look like Brady; that's the problem," Chaz scoffed. "No one can imagine that we belong in a gunfight."  
  
"Better a gunfight than a fistfight," Reid muttered against Langly's shoulder.  
  
"I'm still standing behind the two of you," Langly insisted, pointing at Chaz. "Yeah, sure I've been doing this shit longer than the two of you have been shaving, but I don't like getting punched or shot at or arrested, no matter how many times it happens. At least you get paid to do it."  
  
"I'm supposed to be getting paid to avoid getting shot at," Chaz protested, jamming his hands into his pockets. "Anyway, you said something about birthday presents and you've got a suspicious large brown package behind your legs."  
  
"Which I'll give you here, but Reid's going to kill me if you open it here." Langly patted Reid's side to get him to move out of the way, as he got down from the back of the couch and stepped aside, revealing the flat package. "And we got you something else, too, but that's definitely not public."  
  
"Two super-secret gifts I can only enjoy in the privacy of your bedroom, huh? And how many of these am I going to have to take my pants off for?" Chaz teased, picking up the package and following Langly into the back.  
  
"Just the one, I think," Reid said, after a moment. "I'm not sure what the one you're holding is, but the other one definitely isn't going to fit over your pants. I should know. I helped with that one."  
  
"You bought me... other pants? I'm not entirely sure I trust your taste in my clothing, Langly, nothing personal..." Chaz continued to look entirely baffled, until the door closed behind him.  
  
"It's not quite pants." Reid smiled obliquely. "In fact, I'm not sure it's quite 'clothing', though by the strictest definitions..." He tipped his chin toward the table at the end of the bed, where a pile of hardware and cables sat. "You should open that, though. I don't know what it is and I'm just as curious as you are."  
  
"I promise you know what that is," Langly assured him. "And you said I could give it to him."  
  
"Is this one of Bollinger's photos?" Chaz asked, flipping open his pocket knife and slitting the tape on the package.  
  
"It is absolutely not Bollinger's work," Langly promised, sitting on the corner of the bed.  
  
Reid's eyes rounded suddenly as he nudged Chaz away from the realisation in his mind. "You didn't..."  
  
"The hell I didn't."  
  
Chaz finally freed the frame from the paper and flipped it over to find a breathtaking image of Reid in firelight, with champagne and strawberries. "Holy shit. Oh my-- Holy shit. Did you actually sit for this?"  
  
"I'm still not convinced that's an accurate representation of what that looked like." Reid cleared his throat, somewhat embarrassed to see the image again, now that the champagne had worn off. "It's not quite a photograph, after all."  
  
Chaz tipped the frame and squinted at the image in it. "If that's a digital painting--"  
  
"It's not." Langly grinned and waited until Chaz looked at him. He tapped his own forehead. "I wrote the image. I had to teach myself how to do PNGs for that, but look at the quality. That is exactly what I was looking at, every colour, every line. I may not remember everything, like he does, but I can sure as hell write to disk."  
  
"This is amazing. This is the most incredible thing... I'm hanging it--"  
  
"Between the closet and the bathroom," Langly cut in. "Because that's what size that is. It'll fit perfectly."  
  
Chaz laughed, eyes bright with the kind of happiness he wouldn't have imagined, just the day before. "Of course you did. You remembered." He leaned the frame against the side of the table and turned to Reid, first, taking his face in both hands and kissing him. "I love it. Thank you for letting me have it."  
  
"It was my birthday," Reid said, quietly, as if that explained everything, and between the two of them, it did. The champagne, the more champagne, the utter debauchery they'd both been party to, two thousand miles apart.  
  
"It looks good on you. Wish I could say the same." Chaz turned around, planting a knee next to Langly's hip on the bed, staring down at him. "And you... I would only be happier if you were in it, too. This is... I can't believe you got it in the right size."  
  
"Speaking of the right size..." Langly leaned back and peeled off his shirt and the thermal under it, leaving him in a dense, black stretch fabric with thin cables bonded to it. "The other thing we got you for your birthday, since I know you weren't there for all of his... We saved you the best parts. Perspective of your choice. I'm not sure how well melding them would go, but if you're up for some experimentation, later, I'll give it a shot."  
  
Chaz blinked, eyes round and cautious as he reached out and touched Langly's chest. "What... exactly are you offering me?"  
  
"Virtual reality." Reid extracted the parts of a second suit from under the nightstand. "He's been working on it since the nineties."  
  
"It's not good, yet, but it's better than anything currently commercial. I was consulting on one of the first full-body applications, twenty-odd years ago, and the idea stuck with me. When the company crashed and burned, there was nothing keeping me from building my own and keeping it to myself. We've overcome a lot of the limitations of the early systems, and I've got way the hell more safeties in the code and the hardware than we even imagined were a good idea, back then. But, you know, shit happens, and you rethink some things." Langly pulled a stack of folded cloth from under a pile of cables on the table at the foot of the bed and held it out to Chaz. "Happy birthday. Now you can be me, without the shitty parts."  
  
Chaz reached for the bedpost, missed, and sank dizzily to his knees, around Langly's feet.  
  
"Hey, you all right?" Langly looked up at Reid for a clue, as he set the third suit aside and reached for, but didn't touch, Chaz. Touching people who were freaking out was a good way to get your fingers broken, he knew.  
  
And Chaz didn't answer, right away. The answer was probably 'no', but he'd gotten there the stupid way, and there was no way to make it sound reasonable. He wasn't even sure there was a way to make it sound like it wasn't an accusation, which it _wasn't_. He was fucked up, and he _knew_ that. He knew it even as he pressed his face against Langly's knees and tried to swallow the crying he hadn't done the night before, now back for its revenge. They'd thought of him, and more than just in passing. This wasn't 'haha, everyone wants a weekend in Hawaii'. Langly knew what size that wall was, had made an effort to fill in the perceived gap between what they had and what he had with Reid. It was so much more than he'd expected. It was so much more than he knew what to do with, which was stupid. He had perfectly good friends who knew him well enough to get him gifts that landed perfectly. Why was it such a surprise from Langly? Reid knew him better than anyone but Hafs, maybe better in some ways, and Langly was Reid's boyfriend, everything else aside.  
  
But, it wasn't just Langly. It was both of them. ' _We_ got you', they said, which should have made it less surprising. But, it hit him like something that mattered. Probably because he was still fucked up about Mary. Would continue to be fucked up about Mary, most likely, for quite a while.  
  
He finally nodded against Langly's knees and swallowed a few times in search of his voice. "You-- This is the first time... The two of you..." He sighed. "Spencer, help me out, here."  
  
"You're surprised he wanted to be part of this, after all his objections, after he tried it and said he'd never do it again. You're more surprised he'd go out of his way to build something in pursuit of making it possible in a way he could feel comfortable with. At least I think that's what that is. You're, ah... There's some distortion, in there." Reid cleared his throat and said nothing about the two women in the undercurrents. Dr Langly, he knew. He almost expected that, with how the last few days had gone. The other one was a very close friend, and one Reid didn't recognise, though he thought he'd seen her face reflected in the feathers.  
  
Chaz raised an arm across himself, shoulder snapping as he pointed back at Reid. "Words. Thanks."  
  
"You've underestimated us, again." Reid tossed his own still-folded suit on the bed and sat down on the floor beside Chaz, moving slowly not to jar his back. "You are part of me, in the most literal sense. And you are a part of me that I would like to see happy."  
  
"You're not afraid of me."  
  
"Hey, I, for one, am completely terrified of you. Let's just get that on the table. But, you're hot and you've saved my life at least twice I can name off the top of my head, without even stopping to think about it, so like... yeah, you're a scary sonofabitch, and I _like you_." Langly finally decided it was safe to run his fingers through Chaz's hair. "You're good people. And I've seen how you talk to Allie, too, not because I'm spying but because it took me for fucking ever to learn how not to see every text message in a three block radius all the time. It sucks royal dick. There are things I didn't want to know about any number of people. But, you're good with the kid. I think you're better with her than _Byers_ is. I mean, anyone who can carry on a rational conversation with a teenage girl and then turn around and save my ass? Bonus for all of the above. You're a better man than I am."  
  
"I'm not her dad. It helps." Chaz sniffed and then snorted. "And I'm not getting snot on your jeans."  
  
"Hey, it's not my jeans I'm worried about, all right? Just keep it out of my hair, and we're fine."  
  
"I'm really sorry about this. It's been a rough week. There's a lot of things I thought I'd never have to think about again, and I just jammed my leg into that up to my crotch, so I'm a little... Stupid. Hafs was kind enough to point that out to me. I'm a little stupid, right now." Chaz wiped his eyes on Langly's knees and sat up. "And then you guys just... it's perfect. All of it. And, I mean, of course it is." He shot a glance at Reid. "You _are_ me. You know what's going to be a good idea. But, I just... I was not prepared. Here's me thinking like weekend in the Bahamas, while we wait for the results to come in, because I know how you spend money, Langly, and it's even more over the top than I could ever have expected. I keep thinking I'm going to wake up."  
  
"You know, I have that a lot with Reid," Langly joked, running a thumb across Chaz's cheek. "Have to keep pinching myself to make sure he's real."  
  
"I am not a hallucination. I'm pretty sure of that." Reid rolled his eyes, and Chaz watched him, expectantly.  
  
"Pssh. Today, you're sure of that. Little less sure of that in New Hampshire."  
  
"Yeah, well, being a hallucination in New Hampshire would've given me a much higher chance of survival. We made it, but I am never taking a ski holiday. Ever. Anywhere. We came down and I wanted to move to Barbados, for my health."  
  
"Okay, next time we're on the run from assassins working a twenty-year vendetta? Barbados. It's clean, it's sunny, I might actually be warm for more than three minutes without actual effort on my part...Glad you didn't die, though. I'd have been pissed." Chaz dropped a hand onto Reid's thigh, gripping a little too tightly. "And thank you for... any number of things, really, but right now, for letting me have that picture. You know why. And I do, too. So, thank you."  
  
"I will never understand the way you see me, but at least now I can be sure we're looking at the same thing," Reid teased, prying Chaz's hand off his leg, so he could get his fingers around it. "And it's a good picture! There aren't really a whole lot of good pictures of me, but I think that one counts, even if I might have preferred to be a little more dressed for it. You can see the scar on my knee, in that one. And the one on my neck."  
  
"And you're still drop dead gorgeous." Langly wrenched a foot out from under Chaz so he could nudge Reid's hip with it.  
  
"You know what I see there? You just walked into Mordor and came back with wine."  
  
"The Ballad of Bilbo Badass," Langly agreed, nodding. "Little lanky for a hobbit, though."  
  
"Frodo Badass," Chaz corrected. "Point stands, though. You may not like adventures, but you look like you're good at them. And more importantly, like you're not going to let that make you forget how to have a good time. You look elegant, breathtakingly erotic, and like you could rip the balls off an evil wizard before your first cup of coffee."  
  
"You've seen me before my first cup of coffee." Reid laughed. "I'm not sure I can get across my living room without tripping on something."  
  
"The single was an act of mercy." One corner of Langly's mouth turned up with a smile he couldn't quite suppress, and he tugged at the ends of Chaz's hair. "You doing all right, over there? You look like you've had your lungs pulled out your ass."  
  
"Not yet, I haven't, but you could work on that." Chaz's smile was worse than usual, sick and wary, and the humour didn't carry as well as it might have.  
  
"Do I deserve to be happy?" Reid asked, face expressionless as he watched Chaz.  
  
"Wha-- Of course you do. What the hell kind of--"  
  
"Then so do you."  
  
Chaz recoiled, blinking. "That was dirty pool."  
  
"You are not allowed to turn it into an argument about which one of us is the evil twin. You _are_ allowed to use it against me, later."  
  
"I appreciate that we're both aware that's going to happen."  
  
"Considering we've already had that conversation three or four times, I think it would be unnecessarily optimistic to think we're not going to have it again." Reid tugged Chaz's hand until he leaned close enough to kiss. "You should help me up. I didn't think this through."  
  
"Yeah, I was a little surprised when you put your ass on the floor," Langly admitted. "Knees, sure, but... I figured you had some kind of secret agent training that was going to get you back up with that brace."  
  
"No, we're just not very bright, sometimes," Chaz muttered against Reid's lips.  
  
"Hey!" Reid protested.  
  
"Genius." Chaz rocked back and stood in one motion, stepping into a better position to offer Reid his hands. "Plus eight to INT, minus four to WIS. How... exactly were you planning on demonstrating this virtual reality thing, if only one of you can move?"  
  
"Oh, we already have something recorded for _you_." Langly grinned. "And then I thought maybe we could do something for _him_. You think both of us at the same time would be a little much?"  
  
"Yes," Reid said, letting himself be lifted back to his feet, not to put too much pressure on his back, at the wrong angle. "I want to do it anyway, if Chaz makes it through the first round."


	4. Chapter 4

There were no goggles, and the suit stopped at the neck, so Langly had advised keeping his eyes shut, and Chaz was not disappointed. It wasn't perfect -- he knew what was missing -- but it was good. It was the kind of good that could make someone a lot of money, and Chaz was surprised no one had gone public with something like it, yet. He could feel the weight of Reid's body on him, resistance when he tried to touch. But, the hollowness remained. Reid was at the other end of the bed, watching, amused. The warmth was there, but the scent was not. The visuals, of course, were non-existent. But, the sensation was incredible, and he let himself accept it, get lost in it, believe in it.  
  
"I think it works. Look at the arcs. That's not where I would be on him. That's where I'd be on you," Reid murmured to Langly, from where he was propped up on a support board at the top of the bed, already wearing most of his own suit, with the brace strapped over it.  
  
"Yeah, but you know it works. We traded, after." Langly made no attempt to pretend he wasn't taking notes.  
  
"It's different watching it so long after the fact..." Reid watched, bemused. "I'd say I can almost see myself in the angles, but there's not enough data. That could just as easily be you. Or him."  
  
"It would be different if he was the one on top. Then you'd know it." Langly adjusted the simulation, altering the intensities as Chaz reacted. He watched both parts of the original sequence in one window and Chaz's interactions with the recording of Reid in another, adjusting angles and feedback to keep the two as close to synced as possible. Once he got this right, reactivity would be the next step, but the AI for that would be... the kind of thing he'd only test on himself and maybe Frohike. Decision-making based on active input was still a bit bitchy around the edges, especially when the input wasn't clear and consistent. Something like this... it was a good thing there were so many failsafes in the suit, but he wasn't risking another Matreiya. Especially if he brought even basic responsive decision-making into it. Anything beyond a flowchart was asking for trouble, but he'd gotten this far, and he was pretty sure he could make it work, even if BigGAN still couldn't successfully generate a cat.  
  
Chaz writhed, breath stuttering as his hips rolled, one leg flexing hard. He managed to keep his eyes squeezed shut, despite the desire to watch Reid ride him, a desire he found was much stronger without the reflection of Reid's every desire pounding through him. Still, he recognised that rhythmic clench, having experienced the other side of it, and it occurred to him to wonder how exactly they'd gotten the data for this, given how entirely, reasonably uptight Reid was about what was not going in his ass. And that, he supposed, was the other thrill, here. He'd never had Reid like this, except second-hand, that time they were all far more concerned about Langly. And he still hadn't, but his body didn't seem to mind the distinction.  
  
"It's still weird. I don't know." Reid ran a hand down his own arm, feeling the texture of the suit between skin and skin. "I'm watching this and wondering if I really want to. I have his perceptions, if I want them. I'll still be there."  
  
"Think of it this way," Langly offered, watching Chaz's hands grip flesh that wasn't there, "it's all the good parts of hands all over you, but with no hands. There's no downside. There's no contagion. The suit's yours. Nobody else has ever worn it. It's just you and a good time. Just, this time, it's my good time you're having."  
  
"And that's a perspective I should give some more thought to, because you're right. I'm just still... There are so many ways the human brain can malfunction, and I wish I wasn't so familiar with so many of them."  
  
"I'll put it even more in perspective for you. You're worried about touching things that aren't there, right? Misfiring nerves. Hallucinations. Except this is exactly not that. You're absolutely experiencing sensory input, and it's real. It's just not another person. It's electrical and chemical, and you can turn it on and off. You're in complete control, which last time I checked, is not how hallucinations work. And besides, you liked it, last time."  
  
Reid made a small sound of amusement. "Last time I'd had a lot of vodka first."  
  
"Wish you'd let me leave the bowl of cherry stems for housekeeping." Langly grinned, correcting some clipping. "They'd have been talking about that forever."  
  
"And that is exactly why we didn't leave them. We were trying to get _away_ from people telling stories."  
  
Chaz was almost silent at the other end of the bed, but they both knew him well enough to read the signs, and Reid caught a distant flicker of pleasure, just enough to wonder what it would be like to play that sequence back for himself while sober.  
  
"I am..." Chaz panted, staring up at the dimly-lit bed canopy, "...so impressed. And so pleased to have gotten in on beta testing this. I mean, it's still obviously beta, but I wasn't expecting anything this good to happen until I wasn't in a position to enjoy it. So, I mean, points for that."  
  
"There's a 'but' in there. I can hear it. Also, it's not even beta. This is still alpha. I haven't even finished building the parts for beta." Langly laughed and shook his head. "I've rewritten the core code so many times, in so many languages... I keep thinking it'll be right, and then I hit something I can't do, or I wind up having to re-write the drivers... It's a pain in the ass."  
  
"Have I mentioned I'm impressed?" Chaz stretched, shoulders grinding audibly. "The 'but' is 'but it's weirdly unsatisfying', and I think that might be partly the visuals and partly that I'm spoiled rotten by Spencer."  
  
Langly nodded. "Freaky brain-sex will do that to you, or so I've heard."  
  
"Come back to me?" Chaz tossed one hand further up the bed, and Reid made no move to take it, closing his eyes and tipping his head back, instead. "You want this?"  
  
"Show me."  
  
Langly watched as Reid's hands clenched in the blankets, as he tried not to writhe against the support holding him up. It seemed faster, somehow, as if the experience were compressed in transit, somehow. But, it was apparently just as good, the third time, passed through a machine and someone else.  
  
It was, in a word, confusing. Reid could recognise his own motions, and the fact that Chaz filled in the blanks so well was unsurprising, but amusing. But, it was always disconcerting to be looking at himself, like this. Usually, though, he had the distraction of the actual sensations that went with what he was seeing, but now it was only Chaz's perspective and none of his own, and that was jarring. He was buried deep inside himself, watching his own face react to the pleasure, feeling his own hands clutch at his shoulders.  
  
A soft sound of desperation caught behind Reid's lips, and Langly watched his hands clutch and twist at the sheets, watched his toes point as he gasped and panted. Chaz looked serene, face still damp with sweat from his own venture, and that Langly found disturbing. Practice, he supposed. Do anything enough times, and it gets easy, but...  
  
Less than a minute after they started, Reid opened his eyes and reached for Langly's hand. "I don't... think I'm going to do that again. You, yes. But not me. That's... I'm not comfortable enough looking at myself like that to be having sex with me. Not like that. Either of you, great, but I just ... I find you both far more attractive than I do myself."  
  
Langly looked at Chaz. "Do you know where he put his glasses?"  
  
Chaz rolled his eyes. "You're not supposed to find yourself attractive. Not really. Come on, Langly, seriously, would _you_ do you?"  
  
"Pssh, no. But, I'm actually unattractive. Beautiful women across America agree on that point."  
  
"Consider that neither of us is a beautiful woman." Reid unfastened his own gloves and slid them off. "Also, even if they did agree about that, it's unlikely they'd have agreed on what was attractive."  
  
"Oh, I don't know about that..." Chaz popped the hooks along his forearms, peeling the suit away from his wrists and wiping himself off with the towel tossed over the end of the bed. "I mean, there are certain cultural standards of attractiveness that shift across generations, but you tell me how old someone is, and I can make an educated guess."  
  
"And at least thirty percent of the time, you'll be wrong," Reid argued, trying to reach the tissues on the nightstand.  
  
"I'll be close enough to get a reaction. Besides, trends in culture. A seventy percent hit rate's pretty solid, with nothing but age and gender."  
  
"Try me." Reid smiled and pulled the door shut, between them.  
  
"Rutger Hauer and Ally Sheedy, and I'm cheating because I know you, but I'm right."  
  
"Tom Baker and Molly Ringwald," Reid shot back. " _How well_ do you know me?"  
  
" _Tom Baker_? No shit?"  
  
Langly started to laugh, and it took him a little too long to get words past it. "You're not surprised. You can't be surprised... You've seen the scarf, haven't you?"  
  
Reid blinked owlishly. "You recognised the scarf?"  
  
"Older than you. The dude was on everything for a while. Couldn't really miss him." Langly leaned over Reid and dropped the box of tissues in his lap.  
  
Reid grabbed a tissue and moved the box, unsnapping the crotch panel of the suit, to clean himself off.  
  
Chaz cleared his throat and gestured. "You know, I could--"  
  
"No," they both told him, at the same time.  
  
"The gel," Reid reminded him.  
  
"Right. Thanks." Chaz grimaced.  
  
"It works without the gel, but it works better with, and for your first time with it, I figured we'd all go all-out." Langly shrugged. "It helps. I had to rework a couple of things on the fly because you're not actually each other, but the data's good and the response time is better."  
  
"Run the blanks for the other one," Reid suggested, finally giving up on the tissues and re-closing the panel.  
  
Langly reached out and unplugged Chaz's suit. "You probably don't want to do that again, just yet."  
  
"No, but if you give me ten minutes..." The corner of Chaz's mouth turned up as he stretched out along the bed, propping his head on his hand, next to Reid's hip. "What am I watching?"  
  
"There was a sequence _I_ wanted." Reid wiped his fingers again and then ran them through Chaz's hair. "I mean, I've already seen it through your eyes, but I wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to show it to Langly."  
  
"I never get to see this, because I'm the one doing it, but..." Langly shrugged eloquently.  
  
"I like it, okay? It looks good, it feels good..." Reid crossed his arms defensively and then let them drop as the pull across his back reminded him not to do that yet. Just a few more days, and he'd be fine.  
  
"It's hot to watch, too," Chaz volunteered as one of the undefined figures on screen bent in a way he definitely recognised. "If I knew, in Florida, what you looked like doing that? I'd have slept on the floor to begin with."  
  
"Is that supposed to be flattering?" Reid looked confused at the idea. "That doesn't seem flattering."  
  
"Sure it is. He means I'd have been irresistible," Langly translated. "Which is pure bullshit, but the effort's appreciated."  
  
"It is not bullshit!" Chaz protested. "Have you seen the picture we took of you? And I already had Spencer's memories of ... some things."  
  
"Special Agent Chicken-No-Chopsticks needs to put his damn glasses on more often."  
  
"I'm a little nearsighted. A _little_. I can see you just fine." Reid shot a sidelong look at Langly. "Especially that close."  
  
"You're both blind. I don't know how they let you drive," Langly muttered, picking through the cables and adapters on his other side.  
  
"Not the first time someone's said that about my driving. But, that's usually about my driving, not about me telling them they're gorgeous." Chaz laughed, letting his fingers trace the wiring that ran down Langly's thigh.  
  
"That's because other people don't trust your reflexes," Reid pointed out. "Most of the time, I do. Most. Usually."  
  
"Oh, sure, you trust his reflexes and not mine. I see how it is," Langly huffed, rifling through an assortment of half-finished sequences he'd been trying to automatically extract from Frohike's video archives. None of them were good enough to use. The interpretation of 2d video into 3d animation hadn't gone anything like cleanly, and yeah, they were going to have to record something new, if he wanted new data to play with.  
  
"One of you? Fine. Both of you together? That's a little much. And I wasn't expecting it!" Reid stretched his shoulders uncomfortably. "I'm expecting it, now. I still want to see all the specs for that door, the maintenance, and how old it is. Just... reassure me the hardware can keep up with you."  
  
"See, that's reasonable." Chaz tipped his head back, looking up at Reid. "I just assumed Langly knew his own hardware well enough not to fuck up, which... Here we are, so that worked. Still, if we're going to try to cut it closer, I want to see if the lag is you or the door, before something stupid happens."  
  
"Yeah, all right, that's fair," Langly grumbled, tossing the laptop into the pile of cables with an irritated huff. "Dinner. We should eat. We should all eat before what comes next."  
  
"Which is you, I hope," Chaz teased. "Did you make me a cake?"  
  
"Hey, it's your belated birthday. What kind of asshole wouldn't make you a cake?"  
  
Reid cleared his throat and raised his hand to cheek height, waving.  
  
Chaz grinned. "Yeah, but we know you can't cook."


	5. Chapter 5

Langly refused to open the results until Chaz was there, until there was a witness who gave as much of a shit about them as he did. Byers was interested, but Byers... He'd never really thought Byers understood his relationship with his family. On the other hand, he'd never really understood Byers's relationship with his dad, so they were even on that front. Still, Villette deserved an answer, and to get the answer without any hemming and hawing about whatever the hell it was going to be. He deserved the surprise. They both did. And so he sat on the email for two hours, waiting for the Federal Fuck-twins to show up.  
  
He let Byers get the door, again, afraid that if he stood up, he'd forget what he was doing and open the message somewhere on the stairs. If he was staring at it, there was no way he'd forget.  
  
"I don't know," Byers was saying as they came back into the room. "He's been staring into the screen for hours. Won't open it until you two get here. Something about witnesses. Something about not having to explain."  
  
"Whatever is in these results, it changes nothing between the three of us," Langly declared, turning his chair to face the men now behind him. He leaned to the side to catch Byers. "Or the four of us." He gestured across the room at where Frohike was still watching the news. "Or the three of _us_. Nothing in here changes who I am, whether she's related to me or not."  
  
Byers nodded, understanding the undercurrent in that statement.  
  
"Of course it doesn't," Reid shook his head, and then considered whether that had been a good idea. He was still supposed to sleep in the brace, but It was time to see if he could get through a day without the swelling returning. "You're ... you. You left thirty years ago. Whoever she is, she's functionally a stranger."  
  
Langly swallowed and nodded, turning back to the screen. "Frohike? You wanna see this?"  
  
"Do I want proof you weren't just spawned from a turnip field in the middle of the creepiest part of farm country, USA? Yeah, count me in." The sound of Frohike's chair rolling back preceded his approach.  
  
"Turnips aren't really a big thing in Nebraska. Cornfield, maybe. I'd have been _better off_ in a cornfield. There aren't _cows_ in cornfields, usually." Langly flicked his hand at the screen and stared at the text that filled it.  
  
"Did... is that a mistake?" Byers blinked and leaned in. "Did someone accidentally mix the samples?"  
  
"There's no way." Langly's back straightened on his next breath. "This has to be wrong. There's no way this is even a little bit possible."  
  
"Maybe the interpretation's wrong," Chaz suggested. "Open the actual results. Maybe she was looking at pages from the same sample."  
  
"You can't be twins. There's like fifteen years between you," Reid finally managed. "I'm pretty sure that's not how that works... unless ... I suppose there's a chance-- no, that would be siblings, but not twins. There's no way to split _twins_ like that, not in the sixties. Maybe in the eighties, but absolutely not until after nineteen eighty-four. There has to be an error in the interpretation. Even if this were possible, you'd both have the same sex chromosomes. And, as the analysis indicates, that's not the case."  
  
"I'm gonna say one word about this." Frohike raised a finger toward Byers. "Scully."  
  
"I am not a god damn X-File!" Langly snapped, sending one set of results to one printer and the other set of results to another. There would be no confusion, this time.  
  
"You kind of are," Chaz reminded him. "You're anomalous. That counts."  
  
Byers edged around Langly to get closer to the screen, scrolling through the interpretation. "Dr Reid, you're assuming identical twins."  
  
"Of course I'm assuming identical twins. Otherwise they'd just be siblings. There's no way to genetically identify fraternal twins as anything more than siblings -- they're from two different eggs." Reid shook his head and ducked in front of Chaz to get closer to the screen on the other side. "Assuming, for the moment, that the analysis is correct -- which is a poor assumption -- these should have been identical twins, but one of the embryos was altered in some way, and they were birthed by two different women in the same family, about fifteen years apart. It's ridiculous. And it's especially ridiculous given the time frame. Science fiction, at best. Is there a chance we can have this run again, by another lab? This really doesn't look right at all."  
  
"They're not even related," Langly said, after a moment. "My mom and Aunt Ruthie. It's dad and Joe."  
  
"I'm going to ask you a godawful question, Langly." Frohike rested a hand on Langly's shoulder. "Do you have any photos of your family? Do you look like your parents?"  
  
"Oh, shit." Chaz blinked, a horrifying scenario unfolding in his mind. "She's not anomalous. Not that we're aware of. That's-- hysteria, and I'm not giving in to it. Like Spencer said, the eighties, not the sixties."  
  
"The eighties for successful implantation," Frohike reminded him, as Langly sputtered. "Which is when Mary was born."  
  
"Why the hell," Langly finally managed, "would I have pictures of the family I'm trying to forget I had? And if I had them, they're gone now!"  
  
"If you had them, they're probably with the rest of Susanne's stash of our stuff," Frohike reminded him. "If you _had_ them, we probably still have them."  
  
"Have them again," Byers muttered, absently, leaning across Langly to get a better look at something.  
  
"Byers if you break my glasses with your ass, I'm gonna be pissed," Langly snapped. "I'm on this printer and Mary's on yours. If you really need a closer look, do it on the kitchen table, and don't mix up the pages!"  
  
"The next obvious question is what we're going to _do_." Reid stepped back, as Byers grabbed the first set of pages. "Do we request another sample, and have it run somewhere else? How long is that going to take? Do we tell Mary ... anything about these results?"  
  
Chaz pointed at Langly. "That's up to him. All of it. But, if we do go the second sample route, I'd like to have the samples routed through Frost. She already knows at least two of you are still alive, and you know she can be counted on to handle this with absolute discretion. And I expect she knows people who wouldn't ask _why_ she was requesting these sorts of tests, for a John and Jane Doe. It's a lot less weird coming from a medical examiner."  
  
Byers flipped through the pages, while Langly closed his eyes, trying to make a decision. "Your friend acknowledges that there may have been problems with the samples, but also insists they didn't happen in her lab. She's included the logs to show the two samples were never near each other or tested with the same equipment, because in cases like this -- I'm guessing she means paternity cases -- you can't leave room for an argument that the samples contaminated _each other_. They've got a whole procedure for comparisons that's different to single tests, just in case it comes up in court. There's a whole other level of separation involved, here."  
  
"New question." Reid held up a finger. "Are we sure Mary sent her own tissue as a sample? She's got qualifications that lead me to believe she'd know how to make this kind of alteration to, for instance, DNA to be injected into lab-grown cells."  
  
"That makes more sense than anything else we've come up with," Chaz decided, after a moment. "My only concern is that she overnighted the sample, which means she already had to have it prepared."  
  
"Counterpoint: she was placed in an effort to find Langly, and through him, to find us, and she's been sitting on colonies of matching his-and-hers sample cells for years, just in case. And if that's true, she's probably also got blood." Frohike glanced up at the absurdly tall feds to his sides.  
  
"Why would she only change one thing, though? There's-- if she's smart enough to do this, she's smart enough to know a change that the specific change she made would create an impossible situation," Byers argued. "You can't expect to do something like that and not get caught."  
  
Langly took an audible breath. "Call her back and tell her ... I don't know, whatever you have to. Tell her there's been a problem at the lab and we need a new sample. No, she won't come out for that. Get her here, Villette. I'll put her in some fancy hotel for a few days. I want to put her ass in a chair and get the lab to take its own samples from unexpected places. I want something she's not going to have thought to salt. Throat swabs. Blood from the ankle."  
  
"I'll tell her the samples are weird because we think she might be a chimera. It's just as weird as anything else on the table."  
  
Reid looked Chaz in the eyes, opened his mouth and closed it again, with nothing but a small eyebrow raise.  
  
"No, I don't know. And I don't want to know. And you're the first person to think of asking that."  
  
"Sorry. You said it and the obvious..." Reid trailed off.  
  
"I know. I've thought it." Chaz shrugged and returned his attention to Langly. "Well, call her for me."  
  
Frohike pointed up at Chaz. "Get her to bring family photos. She'll have some. Hell, she might have Langly's, depending on the inheritance."  
  
"Why the fuck do you _care_? What is this with you and the photos, Frohike? I had a boring family, okay? There's nothing interesting going on there. You want to see some dorky kid with glasses, fucking look on the internet." Langly folded his arms and glared, daring Frohike to challenge him.  
  
"Langly, it'll give us leverage, if we have to exhume your parents for bone marrow plugs. If she's your sister, I'm not sure they're your parents."  
  
Langly looked like he might take a swing, and it suddenly passed as he tipped the chair back against the desk and shoved his hands up under his glasses, laughing. "Great, yeah, story of my life. I'm not really their kid. No wonder everything sucked. Still doesn't solve the cows, though. I think that's just god's sick sense of humour. What the hell is the point of a cow, anyway?"  
  
"Steak," Chaz decided with no thought whatsoever. "The purpose of cow is steak."  
  
Frohike tipped his head at Chaz. "I'm with him on that one. It's not our fault you jammed your hand up a cow's ass. That's not what cows are for, Langly."  
  
"I know more about cows than anyone in this room, however much I wish I'd never met one!"  
  
"And it's still not enough, apparently," Byers murmured, raising his eyebrows at Frohike.  
  
"Shut up about cows, Villette has to call my... cousin." Langly nodded decisively. "As far as we know, she's my cousin, Mary. She's Joe and Ruthie's little girl, and I'm wearing boots when I meet her, because I don't want to know if she still bites ankles. Like, assuming she actually is Mary Langly, and this isn't some weird setup to get back at us for something, she's still Cousin Mary, even if she's my sister, and I think that's the most fucked up thing I've said this year and the most I've said about my family in front of any of you."  
  
Reid put a hand on Langly's shoulder and squeezed, gently. "What do we need from her, at this point? Make a list."  
  
"We need her to come here," Langly insisted. "We need her to give the next set of samples in person."  
  
"I want Langly's family photos," Frohike said, again. "If what we're seeing is real, someone did a lot of work on that family, and I want to see how off-base I am, before we go to Nebraska and start digging up graves for DNA samples."  
  
"I want medical records and death certificates for every member of the family we know about, but we can get that without Mary's help," Reid said, his brow creasing as he stared at nothing. "Are Joe and Ruth still alive? Can we ask them if they had fertility treatments of some kind? The age difference is suggestive..."  
  
Langly shook his head. "It's nothing like that. Uncle Joe was older when he got married. There's really just a gap because there wasn't anybody to have his kids."  
  
"Still want to check that. That is the most obvious way this could have happened."  
  
"The samples, the photos, and herself. That seems like all of it." Byers nodded.  
  
"I'd still like to go to dinner with her," Chaz admitted. "But, I'm not going to ask."  
  
"One Langly not enough for you?" Frohike raised an eyebrow, disapprovingly.  
  
"He likes me so much he thought he'd get one he didn't have to share," Langly teased, stretching his legs out and looking up at Chaz. "Does the call have to look like it's from you?"  
  
"It would be better if it did, but no. I said something about calling from a payphone, if I had to."  
  
"I can get you the securest payphone in DC, if you want. Or I can use your line. Doesn't matter, either way, it's the exact same thing, and nobody's getting into it."  
  
"No, you know what, give me the payphone," Chaz decided, suddenly. "The less records linking us, the better."  
  
Langly opened his desk drawer and tossed Chaz a flip phone that looked fifteen years out of date. "Give me a minute, and then just dial."  
  
Reid watched as another screen behind Langly filled with a list of telephone numbers and locations, and then another few windows of things he didn't understand at all, but was sure he shouldn't have been looking at.  
  
"Just broke a payphone in Union Station. Pretty sure I can put it back before anyone notices." Langly offered a lopsided smile. "You're good to go."  
  
Chaz could feel his fingers getting cold, as he dialled. There would be no happy ending -- maybe for any of them. But, Langly didn't want to walk away from the opportunity, so he just kept digging himself deeper into the hole. "Doctor... hey... It's Not Steve Rogers. I've got some good news and some bad news and I'm going to keep talking until the machine cuts me off, in the hopes that you'll--"  
  
The answering machine shrieked with feedback, as the phone was snatched up. "I'm here! I'm here!"  
  
"Am I interrupting?" Chaz asked, looking for any excuse not to have this conversation he knew he had to have.  
  
"Oh, yeah, definitely. Hot date with Fabio."  
  
He swore could hear her roll her eyes.  
  
"Let me guess: Good news, it's my cousin. Bad news, you got another case and you can't make it."  
  
"Weirder. Way weirder, on all counts." Chaz managed a sound somewhere between strained and amused. "Good news, you get an all-expenses-paid holiday in DC. Bad news, it's because the sample you sent is... ah... a little freaky, and our lab guy's hoping it was damaged in transit. She'd like to collect a couple of samples, herself, and run them against the existing data for the other sample."  
  
"Freaky like missing a few bits in the middle or freaky like I'm more closely related to tomatoes?" Mary asked, and Chaz remembered he was talking to someone with a solid grip on at least bacterial DNA.  
  
"Freaky like that shouldn't be possible, but I'm not entirely clear on the finer points, because there are things I'm really good at, but this isn't one of them. The closest I got to medicine was either psych or the ridiculous amount of time I've spent hospitalised. Kind of a coin toss, there." Chaz was sure he sounded like he was faking casual poorly. "But, if you're willing to fly up, we'll put you somewhere nice, and I can take those couple of days and show you around the city, while we're waiting for the results to come back... hopefully a little less freaky, this time."  
  
"So, fly out, sit for another sample, and then do touristy stuff. I mean it sounds great, but it also sounds like I'm missing part of the story, because there's no reason--"  
  
"Because I want to see you, and this is a convenient excuse? The sample being freaky is true, though. Flying you out for a couple of days is just the most convenient way to fix two problems at once." Hell was a place on earth, and Chaz was sure it would come into being as the end result of this conversation. As much as theological metaphor left a bitter taste in his mouth, this conversation was worse. This was actually his fault. This was his doing. And he was going to suffer for it. "You mentioned your cousin, and Agent Reid knew a little about him, and what can I say? I like a good puzzle, and I don't sleep much. But, I'd still like to see you, even if you want me to stop looking."  
  
"I might have some vacation coming. There's nothing urgent going on. When do you want me and how long can you put up with me?"  
  
"If you want to sit for another round of samples, it's going to be at least three days -- there's a two-day turnaround on the tests, plus a day to get out there and get the samples and I am absolutely misusing some resources to get it that fast, but the lab guy's hooked. Once she's sure what she's seeing is real, I'm sure we'll get a proper explanation out of her." Chaz made an uncertain sound and looked at Langly, who held up four fingers and raised his eyebrows. "What do you say to four days, five nights? Hotel's on us."  
  
"Sure, let's go gonzo, here. _I've_ never turned up anything weird, so I think your lab guy's smoking something, but I can humour somebody a damaged sample if it gets me a vacation in glamorous Washington D.C., with a charming fed."  
  
"Okay, so, here's where I ask the weird question. Do you have any photos of his side of the family that you could bring? Like, if he grew up and started looking like his dad, knowing what his dad looked like might help."  
  
"It's Saltville. Everybody looks like everybody else. But, yeah, I probably still have some pictures, somewhere. I inherited, when his parents died, because they couldn't find him. I mean, technically he inherited, but someone had to handle folding up the farm and everything. I keep thinking of selling it, but I can't do it because it's not really mine. It's just still... sitting out there. Had to sell the cows, though, for their own good. But, yeah, I can bring some pictures. He's probably making faces in most of them."  
  
"Awesome. Call you tomorrow with flight info? I think we can get you on a plane by tomorrow night, if you can fly that fast." Chaz tried to sound cheerful.  
  
"The US government at work. Any chance you can get me past the security lines, too?" Mary joked.  
  
Langly shook his head vehemently. He wanted her to go through security, and Chaz was pretty sure he knew why.  
  
"Unfortunately, those are strings I can't pull. I've got a shitton of letters before and after my name, but it's not enough to go head to head with the TSA. I'm not sure Thanos could go head to head with the TSA."  
  
"I mean, if he can only take out half of them, why not go for the top half?" Mary laughed at her own joke. "Okay, call me tomorrow at work and let me know when. Out of Lincoln?"  
  
"Out of Lincoln," Chaz promised. "I'm not sending you to Omaha. I, ah... I'll talk to you tomorrow."  
  
He hung up and handed the phone back to Langly. "I don't feel good about this."  
  
"She was a suspect, when you started thinking it," Reid pointed out. "I'm not sure this has actually gotten any worse."  
  
"Okay, but, the real question here is _why_?" Frohike peered up at Chaz.  
  
"She's smart, she's funny, she's pretty..." Chaz shrugged defensively, shoulders staying high. "She's single."  
  
And Reid finally picked up the undercurrent. 'She's single', which Langly technically wasn't, but beyond that, under that, was something more that Chaz wasn't saying, and Reid thought he knew what that might be. Thought he might have been guilty of the same thing, if his life had gone just a little differently.  
  
"If she looks like him, your taste is questionable, but your taste is already questionable, because you're doing him. And if all this is true, then there's two of him. Who the hell needs two of Langly?"  
  
"People with some goddamn taste," Langly shot back, crossing his arms. "And they've been sorely lacking in my life until this point."  
  
"I knew there was something wrong with the world when you suddenly turned into a harem anime protagonist, but Rule Sixty-Three? Now, this is just getting weird." Frohike shook his head.  
  
"I almost feel like we should call Mulder. This is that kind of weird," Byers said, after a moment. "I almost feel like we should call _Scully_. She'd know what to do."  
  
"I almost feel like if Villette wants to bang my cousin, that's between him and my cousin," Langly insisted, still looking like he might kick the next person who disagreed with him. He looked up at Chaz. "Really, just tell her I was in Witness Protection or something, and all this cloak and dagger shit was to make sure she wasn't an assassin. Which, uh, is pretty much the truth. Like, there's only so pissed a person can be about having their identity verified before getting let in on the kind of classified information that's above even _your_ pay grade."  
  
"And then there's the part where I'm sleeping with you." Chaz tipped his head back, staring up at the distant ceiling.  
  
"Hey, that's only awkward if you let it be."  
  
"Great. _You_ tell her that."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, there really are online directories of payphones, and they've come a long way since the text file lists of the late 90s. [Here's the first one I turned up for DC](https://www.payphone-directory.org/paydc.html).


	6. Chapter 6

"Country girl meets city boy, gets whirlwind tour of American metropolis. That's how the story goes, right?" Mary joked, as Chaz changed lanes in an uncomfortably tight gap. "Might not have been expecting the whirlwind to start in the car."  
  
"I have never been in or caused a car accident that wasn't intentional on someone's part," Chaz promised, with a faint smile. "The job's a little exciting, sometimes. Not so much, usually, but every once in a while..."  
  
"Speaking of every once in a while, how's Agent Reid? The news said he got shot."  
  
"He's finally out of the back brace. We're supposed to take it easy on him for a little while, but I know he's not going to put up with that. Spencer's like that. You get used to him, after a while." Chaz paused to make a left at an intersection designed by an idiot. "He's joining us for dinner. I let him pick the place, because he's buying."  
  
"Is he bringing his boyfriend? I'd like to meet the guy." Mary laughed, one hand still firmly wrapped around the oh-shit handle.  
  
"Not tonight. Frank's up to his eyeballs in whatever the hell it is he does when he's not consulting for us. He's been a little too tied up to handle his own business with the case and all, so he's still trying to catch up. We might be able to drag him away from it in a couple of days."  
  
Mary nodded, looking out the window as they pulled into the loop in front of a large hotel. "There's rumours he's my cousin. That's where you've heard the name before, isn't it?"  
  
"The rumours, thus far, appear to be just that. The FBI has no evidence -- and we've reached out to jurisdictions where we see arrest records for him -- that Frank is actually Richard Langly. Trust me, after he almost got killed over it, we checked." Chaz nodded solemnly.  
  
" _Killed?_ " Mary's eyes rounded.  
  
"Tell you what. You get checked in, I'll park, and I'll tell you the whole story while we wait for Spencer."

* * *

"What the hell, _Special Agent_?" Mary demanded, pulling open the door to let Chaz into a massive suite done in muted gold. "What the hell are they paying you? This place is almost the size of my house!"  
  
"It's bigger than Spencer's apartment, at a glance." Chaz nodded, looking around, trying to judge the size of the room. "Frank handled the hotel for us, and I don't want to know what Spencer promised him for it. He's -- Okay, I don't know how much of the smaller details of West's crimes made the national news, but one of the people he tried to have killed was Frank's business partner, a guy named Ken Fitzgerald, who's a big shit philanthropist, in DC. So, apparently, 'can you get us a decent hotel room for a couple of days' turned into ... this. Personally? I've never set foot in this hotel. I had no idea what we were walking into, but he's probably put people here, before, for business."  
  
"You're right. There's no way he's Cousin Dick." Mary laughed and dropped onto the couch, gesturing for Chaz to join her. "He was smart, but it's like Uncle Pete used to say: he might've been named Richard, but it's not why they called him Dick. Successful businessman? Yeah, not him."  
  
She was going to get the surprise of a lifetime, Chaz thought. "Like I said, you're not the first person to think it. I think that credit goes to a woman who calls herself 'Narcisse'. Now, this was before I knew him, but she almost shot him in Spencer's apartment, because she thought he was Richard Langly, and she thought he'd slept with a guy she had a crush on twenty years ago. And she made a scene about it, when she was arrested, and that's how Tom West heard, which ended in Frank getting abducted and, ah... it was bad. They almost killed him before we got him back." He cleared his throat and sat at the other end of the couch. "Like I said, sometimes the job's a little exciting."  
  
"So, Agent Reid got shot, Frank nearly got killed... What about you?"  
  
"Me?" Chaz pulled his sleeves down. "Nothing on this case. I got lucky, this ti-- Oh, well, no. I guess I got shot in the chest, before we knew what we were dealing with. I forgot that was this case. There wasn't a task force, yet, I was just helping out on what we thought was a simple abduction. Bulletproof vest, though, so it wasn't as bad as it could've been. Spencer got a little less lucky, this last one, but he's alive and well because of the vest. He didn't just get shot, he got shot right in the spine. And then, in typical Spencer fashion, he got back up and kept going. The vest held his back together until we got out of there. Not that I can talk. I've done worse." He shrugged, noticing it made his sleeves ride up. "Anyway, this is depressing as hell. Subject change? How's Nebraska?"  
  
"It's... Nebraska. Corn, tractor accidents, and the occasional weird fungus that suddenly decides it's going to adapt to people's mucous membranes, for the season. Got that one under control, for now. It'd be better to get it out of the fields, but given the amount of damage you can do with an antifungal... We've got something that clears up the human cases in a couple of days, but _people_. Plants? You just spray plants. People have to have opinions about things they know nothing about. You know how it is. You deal with people."  
  
Chaz rolled his eyes and shook his head. Work. He could talk about work. "People are... never quite what you expect."  
  
"You including yourself in that statement?" Mary teased, turning to lean against the arm of the couch.  
  
Chaz's eyes squeezed shut, and when that wasn't enough, he covered them with his hand. A long, silent moment passed. "Yeah. Yeah, I am ... very much including myself in that statement. I need to tell you some things, but I honestly can't talk about some of them, because classified information, blah blah, there's no way I can say this that isn't going to sound like some sleaze pretending to be a spy."  
  
To her credit, Mary laughed. "Do I cue the bad 70s porno music now, or should I wait until you're done?"  
  
Chaz groaned, leaning down until his head rested on his knees. He was hoping to be struck by lightning before he had to have this conversation, but that seemed less and less likely by the moment, especially since he wasn't standing up. "Wait until I'm done. If you still want bad porno music after I'm through, I will find it for you."  
  
"Okay, okay, let me guess... you're secretly an alien, and you're working your way up through the government hierarchy, in a plan to take over the world?"  
  
Chaz looked up, eyes round, but Mary was grinning. "Nah, I'm not an alien. At least we don't think I'm an alien. I'm just an orphan, and my mom was definitely human."  
  
"Bummer." Mary tipped her head contemplatively. "On both counts."  
  
"I don't know where to start, but ... Okay, let me start with my long-term intentions." Chaz swallowed, arms folding in his lap, leaving him looking like he had a stomach ache. "I would very much like to have a relationship with you, but you know that. That's... I've been pretty up front about that."  
  
"Not seeing the problem, yet. Pretty disappointed when we didn't get as far as the naked tango, before you left town." Mary squinted at him and pushed her glasses up. "Lemme guess... You're married? You've got rugrats from your last marriage? Ooh, you got a look at me in actual daylight and you've realised you're gay? I get that a lot."  
  
Chaz snorted. He really did like her. She reminded him of-- he wasn't going to think about that. "Not married, can't have kids, and no matter what a certain tabloid has to say about the task force, not gay. Bi, but not gay."  
  
Mary's eyes lit up. "There's tabloids? Oh, man how terrible are they? Is Agent Reid now the love child of Nixon and Hoover? Are you secretly a botched clone of Elvis?"  
  
Chaz couldn't help himself. He dissolved into stunned laughter. "I wish it was anything that cool. I'd take botched clone of the Lindbergh baby, at this point. None of it's fun stuff, or I'd be scrapbooking it to pass around the office." He shook his head and managed to choke down the laugh. "Not the point. The point is that for reasons I can't disclose, at this time, I can't be more than your friend. Not... now. Later, that may change. I'm trying to get permission to tell you what the hell is going on, so you can decide if I'm worth the trouble."  
  
"So, you know I work on classified projects, right? Can't talk about my work beyond the public health parts of it? Get to handle all sorts of freaky diseases I hope never see the light of day?" Mary rolled her eyes, a smile turning up the corners of her mouth. "I've been quarantined twice. Turned out I wasn't infected, but I get it. I mean, you've got to worry about that with me, too. One day I'm not going to come home and I'm not going to be able to tell anyone why. It's why I don't have cats. It's not fair to them."  
  
"I wish this was something that simple, but if you're still interested, once you know the whole story, I'm in." He held onto his elbows. "If not... I mean, I like you. I hope we can be friends, but I will absolutely understand if you never want to see me again. I'll take that for an answer, if that's what you want. No questions asked."  
  
"Stuck your foot in some nasty shit, didn't you?" Mary studied him, sitting up straighter, suddenly both wary and impressed. "I have so many questions, and I know you're not going to answer any of them. Okay, one question. Do you know where we're going for dinner?"  
  
"Probably this little Indian place that Spencer likes. The food's good and nobody stares when I order half the menu." Chaz kept his eyes on the floor between his knees.  
  
"That's cool as hell! I've never had Indian food. You're gonna have to tell me what's good." Mary leaned to the side, until she was almost level with Chaz. "You look like you're gonna hork. Do I need to get you a ginger ale? They gave me this fancy little brochure at the desk and it says everything in the mini bar's included with the room, so don't worry about that."  
  
"I'm good, thanks." Chaz finally pulled himself together enough to look at Mary, again. "Sorry, that was a little harder than I thought it was going to be. You seem to be taking it well."  
  
"I think this is the first time I've ever gotten to watch a guy hyperventilate because he's afraid of disappointing me. That wasn't on my bucket list, but it should've been."  
  
And Chaz had to think about that. "I'm not hyperventilating."  
  
"Yeah, because you're trying really hard not to. Come on, I work in a hospital. I know what meditative breathing looks like. It's every woman who comes in after a serious farm accident and her husband won't stop talking over her while she's trying to tell the nurses what happened. Not my department, but I pass through the back of the ER on the way to lunch." Mary offered a lopsided grin. "Seriously, though, if you're gonna hork, I should get a bucket."  
  
"I'm not going to throw up. Promise."  
  
"How long have we got before dinner?" Mary asked, smile turning mischievous.  
  
"Maybe an hour?" Chaz checked his pocketwatch.  
  
"You want to spend it making fun of my cousin? I brought the photos you wanted. I mean, most of them are from before I was born, but god, what a dork!" Mary nudged her glasses up with the back of her wrist.  
  
Chaz was kind of curious, though it was somewhat tempered by the thought of anyone getting hold of his childhood photos... of which there were like six, maybe. His mother hadn't really had the money for film, and he'd gotten good at dodging school photo day, later. Somewhere, there were probably pictures, and he wondered what had become of those.  "Can't be any worse than pictures of me. Not just as a kid. You may have noticed I'm kind of a dork, too. And a completely unphotogenic dork. Cameras and I just do not get along."  
  
"Oh, come on, you've been all over the news for weeks. You're dashing, like some kind of Spanish James Bond." Mary got up to get the photo album from her suitcase. "Besides, I don't think there are any _cows_ in pictures of you."  
  
"Cows?" Chaz absolutely did not remark that he knew Richard Langly had serious issues with cows.  
  
"Oh, yeah. There's a great one in here with a cow licking his hair. I don't think I've ever seen anyone look that freaked out."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Totally unedited! I'll care tomorrow!


	7. Chapter 7

"So, this is kinda weird," Mary said, over a bowl of something she couldn't pronounce that was just as good as Chaz said it would be. "I mention my cousin, he's heard of Dick, and now I've got two FBI agents taking me out to dinner on a fairytale holiday in DC. Something's wrong with this scenario, and I know that, but I will take Agent Villette at his word, when he tells me the two of you aren't trying to arrest me or my cousin. I mean, I guess by now he could be some kind of criminal mastermind, but that would require him getting his shit together in a way I don't ... well, my family never believed he could. Maybe they should've had a little more faith."  
  
"We're not looking for him to press charges." Reid shook his head and then rubbed the side of his neck. "Honestly, we've been working on the Colonel West investigation for so long that it's a little strange having time off. You gave us a very interesting missing person to find, and it's been an interesting diversion."  
  
"What he means is we've been excruciatingly bored, because we can't go back to work until the political shit settles, and we find out if we still have jobs. Which I'm pretty sure we do, but bureaucracy is designed around obtuseness and suffering. That's not fair. I know there's a purpose, but it's still not really an enjoyable experience. And he's been even more bored than me. Stuck in that chair for two weeks. So, yeah." Chaz made one of the multitude of stepped-on frog faces and shrugged, reaching for the naan. "Thanks for the distraction."  
  
"Which means you're not actually using FBI resources, right?" Mary looked from Chaz to Reid and back. "I'm not getting you fired because you were bored enough to do this, _right_?"  
  
"Frank," Reid mumbled, with one hand in front of his full mouth.  
  
Chaz nodded. "Frank's got resources we've found it better not to ask about, but he's done a lot of the digging. To be fair, he started digging around the time he almost got killed over it, so we were already interested. You just... gave us an extra nudge in that direction."  
  
"Frank's looking for Dick; Frank's paying for the hotel; Frank's not here, tonight." Mary gestured sharply with her spoon between points.  
  
Chaz looked like he was trying not to swallow his own lips, but Reid managed to keep a mostly straight face, eyes a little round in some impression of innocence.  
  
"Frank has a legitimate business to run," Reid finally managed, after a couple of seconds spent trying not to let Chaz's sense of humour fall out of his mouth. "He spent the week before -- the week we were in Nebraska -- putting together the evidence and the information we needed in order to arrest West. He was working so hard he lost weight, and there's not a lot of him to spare. So, now he's trying to handle several critical projects that got put on hold, and everything's more complicated after it's been postponed."  
  
"Like there's a lot of any of us to spare." Mary stopped with her spoon halfway to her mouth and looked around the table.  
  
"I weigh more than you think I do," Chaz assured her. "He doesn't."  
  
"Weren't you eating?" Reid shot a look across the table at Chaz.  
  
"I can multitask. I'm talented like that."  
  
Mary swallowed, eyeing the assortment of plates stacked and wedged onto their table. "Speaking of eating, I'm not seeing you eat like Chaz, here, so I'm guessing that's not just a skinny FBI nerd thing, then, huh?"  
  
" _Chaz, here_ , has some kind of metabolic disorder." Reid volunteered, when Chaz couldn't get an answer past the lamb and rice in his mouth. "I just survive on bad coffee, most of the time, according to people who don't see me eat as often as they'd like."   
  
Chaz finally managed to wash down the rice. "Frank's pretty sure he's a cryptid, and derives actual nutritional benefit from caffeine. I'm pretty sure he eats at least as much as a dieting soccer mom, _which isn't enough, Spencer_ , but it's technically survivable. Unless you're me. I eat enough for three people on a slow day."  
  
"You should see him when he's actually working on a case. He eats like a hobbit," Reid teased, with a sage nod he regretted less than he'd expected to. "Breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies. And that's all before lunch."  
  
"It's a good thing I cook for myself, most of the time, or I'd be poor." Chaz breathed what might've been a laugh and ducked his head.  
  
"You probably _are_ poor," Reid reminded him. "I've seen your refrigerator."  
  
"Hey, you're the one of us living in a shoebox." Chaz cocked his head toward Mary and pointed to Reid. "His apartment's like half the size of your hotel room."  
  
"I like that shoebox. I fit very well in it. I don't have a need for anything more than what I have," Reid argued, mopping up a bit of curry with some naan.  
  
Chaz rolled his eyes. "Because you never have visitors, and then suddenly you're hosting the whole task force and we're all tripping over each other! It is _tiny_! And your kitchen was designed for _hamsters_!"  
  
Reid looked serenely across a cup of cardamom-spiced coffee. "There's a reason I live alone, you know. And that kitchen is more than I actually need. I could get by with a microwave and a hotplate, but I like _having_ a kitchen. Just one of those indulgences I sometimes forget I take for granted."  
  
Mary gave Reid a long, intensely curious look. "Yyyyeah, I don't know you that well, but a kitchen is not an indulgence. It's kind of a necessity. I mean, I get the whole government job, haven't been home in two weeks thing, but the kitchen's a legally required part of a rental property, right up there with electricity and insulation."  
  
"He's been through some shit. Honestly, we both have. It's just not the same shit, in most cases, so we're each others' perspective." Chaz took a massive swig of his mango lassi, before he went on. "And that said, a kitchen is a necessity, and I'm not poor. I've _been_ poor, and this isn't it. More to the point, you deserve a damn kitchen, Spencer. It's kind of a fundamental right."  
  
"It's a luxury," Reid insisted, looking Chaz right in the eyes, "and I appreciate it as one. I am grateful to have a kitchen. I am thankful for the windows. I am eternally appreciative not to be at ground level. It's a very nice shoebox, and perhaps more relevant, it is _my_ shoebox. Not all of us have a burning urge to deal with bridge traffic first thing in the morning."  
  
"I've got a very nice place on the other side of the river, speaking of luxury," Chaz explained to Mary.  
  
"Yeah? This the part where we go back to your place for a drink, and enjoy all that luxury?" She grinned at him.  
  
"Not tonight. I live with my sister and it's better not to surprise her." Chaz shook his head, looking more than a little unnerved by the idea. He really did want to bring Mary home with him, but he knew where that would end up. Hafs seemed like a safer excuse than 'I'm sorry, but I don't think I'll be able to tell you no nearly as well in my own house, especially after the second beer'.  
  
"'Sister', huh?" Mary made finger quotes. "This part of what you're not telling me?"  
  
"I know what he's not telling you, and it has nothing to do with Agent Gates." Reid caught Mary's eye with a very serious look. "I don't know if they're actually related -- I'm not sure anyone knows -- but she's definitely his sister."  
  
"We're orphans. We adopted each other." Chaz shrugged. "Well, she adopted me, I guess. She's older and she's worked for the Bureau longer. She's _got_ parents, and now I've got her parents, too. I like them. They're kinda weird. We're kinda weird. It works out." He left out the part about the absolute necessity of earplugs in the Gates household as irrelevant to the point at hand.  
  
"She, ah, has some fairly strong opinions about being perceived as flirting with people he's slept with, so I'd be incredibly surprised if their relationship were anything other than platonic."  
  
"Her opinion's somewhere around 'Eww! Gross!'" Chaz's voice sounded uncannily like Hafidha, and he cocked his head apologetically at Reid. "I'm almost afraid to put the two of you in a room for other reasons. I'll come back from the bathroom and discover you two have taken over the world in the five minutes I was gone."  
  
"You assume you'd have to leave the room for that to happen." Mary winked at Chaz.  
  
"Direct observation has a minuscule, but measurable effect on the state of things. I feel like the act of not observing and then observing might trip some sort of breaker on the quantum state of the universe, putting us in a reality in which you and Hafs rule the world, but the highest quality electronics are made by sentient squid. I'm not sure that's really a chance I want to take, at this stage in the relationship."  
  
Reid snorted into his napkin, trying not to laugh. "Implying there's a stage in any relationship at which the minuscule risk of world domination and sentient squid becomes a worthwhile one."  
  
"You're dating Frank. I think you already made that choice, and I'm pretty sure you guys broke reality while I wasn't looking."  
  
"I don't think the word you're looking for, there, is 'reality'." Reid's hand barely lifted from where his wrist rested on the edge of the table to produce the quotes for that. "Besides, we're leaving your date out of the conversation, again."  
  
"It's kind of interesting just listening to the two of you go on. I know more about both of you now, than I did when I sat down. You two know each other pretty well, huh? This one of those geeks all sit in the back row on the first day of class things?" Mary reached across Chaz for the gulab jamun he hadn't gotten to, yet, and Reid sucked in a sharp breath.  
  
"Would you believe I met him this year?" Chaz shifted his attention to the dessert, before Mary could swipe too much of it.  
  
"This was our first case together. We met in the field." Reid nodded, still working his way through the one dish he'd gotten for himself.   
  
"Of course, because it was this case, we then spent five months directly up each other's asses, six days a week, so we really do know each other pretty well." Chaz gestured at Reid with his sticky fingers. "He doesn't snore and he's way more paisley-tolerant about his sleepwear than I am."  
  
"Grey and flannel. That year, paisley was in. I'm a lot less tolerant of lumberjack pyjamas."  
  
"Whatever they have in my size that isn't paisley, lumberjack plaid, or a fake union suit with a full-front zipper." Chaz grinned. "Which usually means cats and moose. Or that one year Hafs got me the Christmas pyjamas with dancing reindeer on them."  
  
"You have dancing reindeer pyjamas?" The corners of Mary's smile sat a little too high.  
  
"Well, I'm not _wearing_ them yet. It's still November."  
  
"And we're in public," Reid reminded him.  
  
"You've met me. Would I really not wear pyjamas to a dinner that wasn't black tie?"  
  
"You wouldn't wear your Christmas pyjamas, because you'd freeze, if you only wear them in December."  
  
"That's probably a good point.  I was going to say something about thermals, but you're right." Chaz tipped his head toward Mary. "He's a profiler; he's good at jumping to weirdly accurate conclusions."  
  
"So are you! You're just down the hall in flying saucers, instead of in the BAU with the rest of us!"  
  
"He specialises in torture and murder. I specialise in things that make you go hmm," Chaz explained. "Same job, really. Slightly different application."  
  
"I hate you," Reid groaned. "I'm going to have that song stuck in my head all night."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's short and it accomplishes very little, but here, have one more chapter before I go back to what I get paid to write, for a week or so.


	8. Chapter 8

"Nice lab," Mary said, as she left the building with Chaz. "Place like that almost makes me consider going private, but then I'd never get the fun stuff."  
  
"Fun stuff like cow parasites?" Chaz teased, jamming his hands into his pockets so he wouldn't put an arm around her shoulders. "Spencer said you wrote an article about cow parasites. He thought it was good. I can't say I've picked it up, yet."  
  
"Hey, the cow parasites were an adventure, but I still liked them better than the corn fungus." Mary rolled her eyes and pulled out her phone to take a photo of a banner for a local event hanging over the street. "Gotta take pictures, or I'm going to get home and think this was all a dream. It's _weird_ enough to be one."  
  
"Come on, you've been sent places to perform weird science before, right?"  
  
"Perform being the key word there, my dude. I don't usually get sent around to be the subject of tests. I'm not really that interesting." She held up a hand. "Don't say it."  
  
"It's true!" Chaz shrugged defensively. "Anyway, we've got time and money, and a metro area that spreads into two states from here. You want to do something touristy? I can stand around and take pictures of you doing all the classic tourist stuff."  
  
"You know what might be fun...?"

* * *

"Oh, good, I caught you."  
  
Reid made an entirely derisive sound into the phone, from where he sat in the chair he'd spent far too much of the last few weeks in. It was incredibly comfortable, though. "Where else would I be?"  
  
"I don't know, Frank's maybe? You're out of the brace. You've probably got some catching up to do," Chaz teased, the sound of traffic filtering in behind him. "Mary and I want to know if you'll come out with us again, tonight."  
  
"I don't know if that's a good idea," Reid demurred. "At least one of us -- We've had this argument. You know what I'm going to say."  
  
"Yeah, I do, and I think it's a bullshit argument. Come on, Spencer, it'll be fun."  
  
"I'll remind you that our definitions of 'fun' that involves leaving the house or the office don't coincide very well, except where they involve food. If you're taking her climbing, you're on your own."  
  
"I'm not taking her climbing. I'm taking her dancing--"  
  
"No. Absolutely n--"  
  
"Spencer, come on, I'm not asking you to dance. I'm asking you to stop me from making an ass of myself."  
  
Another voice could be heard, presumably Mary's, but just a little too quietly for Reid to make out the words. He wasn't on speaker, then.  
  
"You want me to what, stop you from kissing her? I think if that's something you can't count on yourself for, maybe you should drop her back at the hotel."  
  
Reid could feel Chaz recoil at the suggestion, the flash of anger and confusion like he'd been slapped.   
  
"No, I'd just like you there as a reminder. Also, because I would like to take you out to do something enjoyable that requires very little effort on your part. You can take the corner booth and just listen to the music. But, if you're going to continue to be a shit about my intentions, you can sit on your ass at home, instead."  
  
"Which is what I've been saying all along!" Reid's annoyance finally slipped into his voice.  
  
A lengthy silence hung between them, and then Chaz spoke, again. "I don't want this to turn into a fight. This is a completely stupid fight to have. But, I can tell you're worried about something happening, and I can't tell what it is. I wouldn't be inviting you if I didn't think I could make this at least an inoffensive experience for you, but I can't do that if I don't know what you're worried about -- I mean, I think I'm right, but I'm not really in a position to start guessing, and I don't want to say anything ... personal."  
  
"I just don't like nightclubs," Reid insisted, knowing that Chaz _could_ find the answer, but was asking him anyway.  
  
"Okay. That was my last attempt. If that's what you're sticking with, I'll take that." Chaz paused, and Reid could feel him pull away -- not all the way, but back enough not to accidentally be in the way of a memory. "Call me, tomorrow, and let me know if we're back at work on Monday."  
  
"I will," Reid promised, realising he couldn't feel Chaz's disappointment, hadn't been able to through the whole conversation. He'd let the horror at Reid's accusation slip, but nothing else. "When are you going, tonight?"  
  
"Figured we'd leave town around seven. It's not that far. Maybe an hour, if you're not me. Get there around opening, if the DJ's good, stay 'til closing. Why?"  
  
"If I-- Never mind. Have a good time."  
  
"Spencer, come on, what?"  
  
Reid made a dismissive sound. "If I were to go with you, would you take me home, if I wanted to leave?"  
  
"Is that a serious question? You know me. There are people I'd tell to take a cab, and you're not one of them. I know better." Chaz's voice got muffled, but it was still audible. "If he comes with us, we're taking him home if he stays uncomfortable. You good with that?" The answer was inaudible, but it must've been affirmative, because Chaz returned with a proposition. "I'm driving, so if you're thinking about it, drinks are on me."  
  
"That might be what I'm worried about."  
  
"If this is about the photos of you after too many daiquiris that I still haven't seen, I might add, I will remind you that I'm not getting you drunk, because I need to be able to drive us home. And I'm not taking any pictures you don't know about, because that's a dick move, and yeah, I'm a dick, but not to you. Usually."  
  
"When you're a dick to me, it's in a very different way, and one I don't think I should be discussing in front of present company. Yours, not mine. I'm assuming she doesn't know."  
  
"Those are all accurate statements. So... are you coming, or what?"  
  
"Promise me no one's going to touch me. _Promise me."_  
  
"I can't. ... Well, maybe I could, but I'm not comfortable enough to _promise_. I can absolutely swear to you it won't happen more than _once_."  
  
Reid closed his eyes, taking stock of himself. "You're going to know that touch exactly as I do."  
  
"I expect no less."  
  
"You really want me there."  
  
"I do."  
  
"I'm... not sure I have appropriate clothing," Reid admitted, trying to make sure he'd covered every eventuality, before he gave in, like he knew he would.  
  
"Wear black. Jacket, not a sweater. Cravat if you've got one. If not, top two buttons open and wear your glasses," Chaz suggested, rifling through his memories of Reid's wardrobe.  
  
"Oh," Reid blinked as a few of Chaz's memories slid by him. "Not like you, like _Hafidha_."  
  
"There you go. Can you manage?"  
  
"Yeah!" Reid sounded surprised. " _That_ I can probably do."  
  
"We're going to grab dinner first. Pick you up around--"  
  
"At Frank's public-facing address."  
  
"Seriously? Are they still at your door?"  
  
"It's Bollinger's fault. Are they not at yours?"  
  
"I don't actually care. Between Frank, Hafs, and my _driving_ , no one can keep track of me long enough. I'm pretty sure they've also discovered there's a network dead zone in the parking lot. And for bonus points, I'm way less interesting than you. You're cute and controversial. I look like a reject goblin from Labyrinth. Also, I've gotten really good at staying off the news since that time a girl broke up with me because a file cabinet fell on me."  
  
And Reid understood what Chaz wasn't saying: It didn't matter who was waiting for him, if they couldn't recognise him. "Ouch. Quarter to seven at Frank's door, then?"  
  
"Be there or be an equilateral rectangle."  
  
Reid hung up on him.

* * *

"This looks like the kind of place where I'm going to get punched in the face," Reid muttered, standing in line between Chaz and Mary, trying not to pick at the genuinely ridiculous pearl cufflinks on his only black button-up shirt. He'd gone for a low-contrast black on black, with a few accents, instead of the stark contrast he'd decided made him look like he was trying to be a vampire. Badly. At least he'd sort of match Chaz, he'd thought, but they looked just enough alike, now that Chaz's summer tan had started to fade, that they did look a bit like high-income and low-income variants of the same person, in the low light along the side of the club. He was glad he'd decided to leave his jacket in the car, at the last minute.  
  
Chaz wore pretty much what he always wore: just enough eyeliner to keep other people's eyes off his lips, pants that hung low on his hips, huge black boots, arm warmers, and a black t-shirt. This time, the shirt read 'Fuck Art Let's Kill' on the front, which just made Reid feel overdressed. Mary had pulled her hair back in a black ankh-patterned scarf that went well with a black shirt with a symbol for a band Reid didn't recognise on it. From the waist down, she could've traded with Chaz to little effect.  
  
"Wait until you get inside. About half an hour from now, more people dressed more like you will show up. It always takes the romantics longer to get dressed." Chaz put an arm around Reid's waist, very obviously, murmuring, "This is part of how I make sure no one else touches you. If people think you're here with me, no one's stupid enough to try it. Well, most people aren't that stupid, and the rest of them are straight men."  
  
"Hey, I used to be a straight man!" Reid protested around a surprised laugh.  
  
"No, you weren't," Mary assured him, from the other side. "You were just meeting men you didn't like. It's easy to do that."  
  
Reid pointed at Chaz. "Does his ego really need the help?"  
  
"... Yes? Always?" Chaz laughed, but Reid knew it was true. He'd felt the way Chaz took compliments, like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop.  
  
Reid was still not quite sure of his clothing choices as Chaz led him into the club, paying for all three of them. None of them got carded, he noticed, and he wondered how old they _looked_ , compared to the rest of the crowd. He looked his age, he thought, and no one questioned it. Of course, the woman at the counter seemed to know Chaz, so that was another point in his favour.  
  
As they turned toward the dance floor, the music already too loud for conversation, Reid thought, a man wearing an intricately purple-embroidered black frock coat and a tophat approached Chaz, smiling. And for the first time, Reid thought he might be underdressed.  
  
"Where's your sister?" the man bellowed, clapping Chaz on the shoulder.  
  
"Out with her friends." Chaz seemed to barely raise his voice, but he was clearly audible despite the noise. "Brought some other people to keep me company, tonight."  
  
The man swept off his hat and bowed, offering a hand to Mary as he rose. "Please, call me Vittorio."  
  
"Burke." Mary grabbed his hand and shook it roughly. "Call me Burke."  
  
A thought passed between Chaz and Reid, and they both barely held back the same smile.  
  
"A pleasure to have a name for your face, Burke." Vittorio turned and went through the same with Reid, though with a less sweeping bow. When he offered his hand, Reid clasped his own hands behind his back.  
  
"You may call me Knox." Reid kept his chin high, his eyes distant.  
  
"Mr Knox doesn't shake hands," Chaz clarified, smiling wickedly as his hand moved that little bit further, fingers curling obviously around Reid's hip.  
  
"I never took you for the jealous type." Vittorio raised his eyebrows at Chaz, curiously. "Besides, you know I prefer women."  
  
"I'm not, but he knows six ways to dislocate your fingers in the course of a normal handshake, and he likes to practise them." Chaz looked wholly smug, dropping his other arm across Mary's shoulders. "I'm just special. Isn't it time for someone to think I'm special, Tory?"  
  
"Far past time, my friend." Vittorio smiled warmly and patted the top of Chaz's shoulder. "I hope they treat you well."  
  
As Vittorio moved past them, toward the bar, Reid leaned in toward Chaz's ear. "Why do I feel like I just missed an entire level of that conversation?"  
  
"Because you did. Let's stop standing in the entry, and I'll explain what just happened." Chaz squeezed Mary's shoulder and cocked his chin at a lone table perched on the wrong side of the DJ booth.  
  
She smiled and nodded in obvious understanding, leaving Reid just as confused as he'd been, as they stepped out onto the dance floor.  
  
Chaz and Reid fell into sync almost immediately, moving across the floor in mirror image, parting around dancers and rejoining on the other side. Reid let Chaz lead, surprised at the sinuous grace with which his own body responded to Chaz's decisions. What he'd feared would be a difficult process of tripping over people until they crossed the floor turned into perfectly timed fluid motion, missing everything in their path -- a skill Mary seemed to have independently of them, and Reid wondered if that was just something one picked up after enough time in _dance_ clubs.  
  
Chaz nodded for Reid to precede him into the round booth that sat a few steps above the dance floor and behind the DJ, putting it also behind the _speakers_ , Reid realised as he sat and made room for Chaz. It was the least-deafening seat in the building, most likely, and that was probably exactly what it was put in for.  
  
Chaz nudged him. "Keep moving. We're going to put you all the way in the back. I'm going to sit with the two of you for a few minutes, and then I'm going to go get drinks."  
  
Mary slid in on Reid's other side. "I heard we gotta keep you safe from the savages. Don't worry, they're mostly harmless. We put you up here, and nobody's going to come looking, unless they think they're important, and they're still going to stand on the other side of the table, until you invite them to sit. That's pretty much the same anywhere with a booth like this. If somebody doesn't know you, they're not going to sit down. Especially if you're sitting with other people's drinks."  
  
"Yeah, we're setting you up to look like you're watching our drinks. Nobody's going to look twice." Chaz nodded, knowing Mary would get what he'd been working toward.  
  
"You sit in a booth with an opposite side, though? That's when people start assuming they can sit across from you and start talking. Round ones like this, nobody's going to take the chance." Mary kept a decent amount of space between herself and Reid. "Knox, huh? Not Hare?"  
  
"Hare's too easy to misinterpret in unpleasant ways. All the ways you can mishear Knox improve it." Reid smiled and shrugged. "It's a bit funny that I ended up with the anatomist, but I couldn't recall having heard the names of any of the policemen involved and the Lord Advocate wouldn't have been nearly as amusing."  
  
"It's probably better you didn't say Hare. Burke and Hare, and Tory would've been _concerned_. He's got a Masters in Scottish Literature. He'd have noticed." Chaz moved closer to Reid, so Mary could hear him better. "And because I know you're going to ask, Tory's... influential. It's good we ran into him in the entry, or I'd have had to go looking for him to introduce you. By the end of the opening set, two-thirds of the club will recognise you both as independently dangerous and my lovers. And I apologise for that, but it's just... easier. It's the shortest path between 'new and interesting' and 'don't touch that'."  
  
"He's influential, and yet he doesn't call you by any name, and you address him by a diminutive," Reid observed, neglecting to comment on the rest.  
  
"Tory and I get along. We know each other semi-professionally, and neither of us talk about work, _here_. He didn't call me by name in front of you, because he doesn't know what you call me, and the wrong name would put him at an immediate disadvantage, but most of the time, if we're here, he'll call me Orpheus, because he's an _asshole_. You might hear other people call me 'Seth' or 'Mutt', depending on where I met them. Assuming you can hear anything at all..."  
  
"Orpheus?" Reid asked the curiosity clear in both his tone and his face.  
  
"I _really_ don't want to talk about it." Chaz made a terrible frog face and turned away, studying the dance floor. "Opening set's almost never quite danceable, but it's short. Just long enough for everyone to get here and go through all the social gestures and the buying of drinks. Some people will still dance to some of it, obviously, but this is also an unusually good song for this early in the night." He leaned back to see if he could get a look at the DJ, but he was too close. "I'm going to go get drinks for us. It'll be about ten minutes, because Tory was headed to the bar when he passed us, and everyone's going to want to say something to me. Some of it's going to be bets on how long the two of you can put up with me."  
  
Chaz slid out of the booth without another word, and Reid watched him glide through the sparse crowd on the dance floor, interrupting no one.  
  
Mary cleared her throat. "So, wild guess, but the thing he's not telling me, the thing he thinks I'm going to think less of him for? The two of you are dating, aren't you? That's why he wants you here."  
  
Reid blinked, blinked a few more times, and shot Mary a sideways look. " _Dating?_ I can assure you the only things that have been anything like dates that I've gone on in the last year have been with _Frank_. Because Frank is my boyfriend, and that's what boyfriends do, or so I'm told. First time I've had one, but not the first time I've been one, so my expectations may be a little skewed. No. We're very close, but Chaz and I are not _dating_." He ran a hand through his hair, wishing Chaz would hurry up and come back, but all he got was a flash of apology. "I'm here tonight, and last night, because he's extremely attracted to you, and I'm supposed to keep him from _doing_ anything about that attraction."  
  
"In the middle of a nightclub," Mary scoffed and then looked thoughtful. "In the middle of a nightclub? Is he really that kind of wild?"  
  
"Far be it from me to tell stories that aren't mine." Reid shrugged and offered a sympathetic look. "But, I know he very much wants to be in love. I can see it in the way he looks at us, when Frank and I are together, and I'm not saying that to put any pressure on you. I hope that once he can tell you -- and I can't tell you either -- what's going on, he can explain his own desires to you, and you can make an informed choice about what you want from him. But, right now, I don't think I can tell you much more than he's said about himself."  
  
"In love, huh?" Mary leaned back in the booth, propping one knee against the edge of the table. "I don't know about that. How do you even pick that when you barely know someone? But, he's cute. I'm definitely down for some naked tango time, but _love_?"  
  
Reid shook his head. "He just wants to see if it could happen. I really don't think he has any expectation it's going to work. He's... good at statistics. I'm pretty sure he knows a long shot when he sees one. But, I know he'd like to try, and I know he's been thinking about it since he first called you to go to dinner with him in York. I know it, because he kept me up all night, wondering if you'd be interested in him at all."  
  
"I'll be honest, I was half expecting _you_ to call me, not him." Mary cleared her throat loudly. "You were... kind of staring."  
  
"You just... surprised me. I wasn't expecting to meet anyone who looked so much like Frank." Reid took a breath to start another sentence and stopped with his mouth half open. His brow creased as he realised how that had probably sounded. "My boyfriend is very pretty."  
  
Mary laughed. "Not if he looks like me, he's not. ... Well, maybe. I saw that one photo. He's definitely prettier there than he is on the news."  
  
Reid smiled fondly. "In the right light, he's breathtaking."  
  
"Yeah, okay, you're right. Obviously, you're not dating Chaz. Not if you're making faces like that at the thought of Frank."  
  
"Like I said, Chaz and I are a very different kind of close. People sometimes call us 'evil twins', but they're wrong. _We're_ not evil. I might be, but he's just weird."  
  
"I kind of like the weird," Mary admitted, nodding slowly.


	9. Chapter 9

Reid had no idea why Chaz had decided he needed a Mai Tai. He'd have been fine with a beer. It was probably some sort of social cue he lacked the context for, but he sipped it anyway. He doubted one drink would put him at a disadvantage, even in an unfamiliar place. And he was, as Chaz had pointed out, before returning to the dance floor with Mary, sitting directly next to the fire alarm, in the event something _did_ go the kind of wrong that would make it a reasonable choice. Not that either of them thought he'd wind up in that kind of trouble, but the rate at which unprecedentedly terrible things happened to him seemed to be a significant statistical anomaly. Anyway, Chaz was there. If anything went wrong, Chaz would know, _immediately_. Neither of them were armed -- No, he didn't know that. He knew _he_ wasn't armed, and he'd assumed Chaz wasn't -- but, Chaz was far more subtly dangerous than anything here, tonight.  
  
Or, Reid hoped he was, anyway, or they were going to have some serious problems, before the night was out. People more dangerous than Chaz were statistically more likely to be serial or mass murderers, because that was what the Anomaly did to people.  
  
It was a nightclub. Reid reminded himself the worst thing that was likely to happen was getting hit on by drunk girls who wouldn't take no for an answer.  
  
He sipped his drink and watched Chaz and Mary dance amid the flashing lights. In another context, it might've been a martial arts demonstration. Mary wasn't short, though she was a bit shorter than both of them, a bit shorter than Langly, if Reid didn't miss his guess, but she sidestepped and bobbed under Chaz's leg as he swept his foot over her head in the middle of a turn. They didn't seem to have quite the same synchronicity as he had with Chaz, but they read each other's intentions well enough that neither of them had tripped over the other or taken a foot to the face. It was like watching the mating ritual of a species of bird he'd never seen. He was sure there was a pattern here, some base structure of the dance they were performing, but aside from the part where they obviously both knew the music well enough to trust it, he couldn't pick it out.   
  
They'd started simple -- he could follow them, for the first few songs -- but, then they got comfortable with each other, and he had no idea how to read the cues. It was interesting, though, that a thousand miles apart, they'd both become part of the same culture in a way that let them understand each other like this. It wasn't impossible, by any means, but it usually involved more structure: ballroom dances and baseball weren't changed by distance. If you learned them in one place, you could practise them anywhere, but those came with instructions, with sets of rules you could study, with instructors who taught the rules and helped one practise their application. He wondered where the differences would come in, here, where the local traditions and house rules would intersect in incompatible ways.  
  
As the song began to transition into another, Chaz smiled at Mary, ran his thumb across her lips, and then turned his eyes to Reid, tipping his head in invitation. Mary turned to look, as well, but her look was far more curious than Chaz's visceral desire. Reid resisted, just to make sure he could, and then slid out of the booth, letting Chaz's sense of the music and the floor lead him.  
  
Mary stepped back as Reid's fingers met Chaz's, their hands folding together, stretching to the side, as the space between them closed. They moved... she almost wanted to say 'like lovers', but that wasn't even it. They moved like they'd done this a hundred times before, like they knew each other _perfectly_. People could be married for forty years and not know each other as well as these men did -- her parents still stepped on each other's feet when they danced at weddings.  
  
_"Seduce, let loose, the vision and the void..."_  
  
Clockwork, Reid thought, as he and Chaz circled one another, hands always clasped in one way or another. They moved like clockwork figures, perfectly timed. And then Chaz spun him out, back, and dipped him, and he could feel the music in his lips, resonating under his skin. Whether he liked the music seemed far less relevant than the fact that it liked him, the air and the floor reverberating with the sound, and the vibrations distantly reminiscent of Langly's mouth on his skin.  
  
They moved like a machine, Mary decided, as they circled ever closer to one another, shoulders touching, sliding across each other's backs, leaning until they only touched at the fingertips. An incredibly sexy machine, she thought, as Chaz dipped Reid again. Reid's laughter was inaudible against the music, but it was clear on his face, and it didn't make him clumsy. Neither of them missed a single step, which was for the best, given how entwined they were. They'd both fall.  
  
She realised she wasn't the only one watching, a gap of a couple of feet having opened around them as other dancers moved out of the way and some retreated to the edge of the floor to just watch and whisper.  
  
Reid had lost the rest of the room, at some point. His entire focus was the points at which he and Chaz touched, and the rest of the motion seemed to follow naturally from that. He could remember having been sedated into a haze, but not quite unconsciousness, a few times, and the sensation was oddly similar, but much more pleasant. Chaz's teeth clicked just beside his ear, from behind him, where Chaz had pressed against his back for a split second, hand splayed across his hip, and Reid knew he should have been intensely discomfited by any one of those things, never mind all of them together, but it was Chaz, and he knew Chaz. More than that, he _was_ Chaz. And like this, they were two halves of some greater whole, reflections of each other and of some unrealised ideal they both fell short of, alone. And probably still, even together, if he was honest, but the certainty they had, together, felt amazing against the usual parade of doubt in the back of his head.  
  
The song ended rather definitively, as Mary recalled, and she had just enough time to wonder how they were going to top what they'd managed so far, before Reid turned half toward her, suddenly, Chaz unfolding backward across his arm, to end with one leg propped on Reid's shoulder and his fingers touching the ground at her feet. He caught his breath and winked up at her, and she mouthed 'holy shit' in return.  
  
Reid grabbed Chaz's shirt and tugged him back up, letting the leg slide down that arm until it was caught at his elbow and Chaz's hands clutched at his shoulders. He leaned in closer to be sure Chaz, and only Chaz, could hear him. "I'm not sure which one of us is thinking it, but I should go sit back down, because I very much want to have sex with you, right now. _Right. Now._ I'm not sure I'm okay with that, in this place, at this time, as generally pleased with the idea as I usually am."  
  
Chaz grinned and untangled his leg from Reid's arm. "It's both of us. Sorry... ish. I wanted to give you that song, when I heard it start. I've only danced it _with_ two other people -- usually I'm alone -- but if anyone could handle it, you could. I wanted to give you something to remember from tonight, more than just watching my drink... which I'm going to have to pour into a plastic plant, now, but that's my fault."  
  
Reid stepped aside, one arm still behind Chaz, Chaz's hand still on his closer shoulder, to open an angle between them to Mary. "Sorry to cut in like that."  
  
"Are you _kidding me_? That was incredible. That was fucking amazing. Where the _hell_ did you learn to do that?" Mary's eyes were bright and round.  
  
A smile played at the edges of Reid's mouth, tainting the apparent innocence of the rest of his expression. "In the field. We work well together."  
  
Reid slipped away, and Mary watched him go, somehow just a little less graceful and certain than he'd been coming down to them. She reached up and put a heavy hand on Chaz's shoulder to get him to lean down closer to her height, where she playfully tugged his hair, leaning in to say something, closer to his ear, but she didn't get the words out, before his hand wrapped around her wrist like a vice.  
  
The sensation shot through Chaz's body, setting smouldering fires along his nerves. He wanted her; she wanted him. And he was not going to do this. He swallowed, trying to get enough spit back into his mouth to make words that didn't sound like he'd been sucking chalkboard erasers. "Don't pull my hair."  
  
Mary's hand flashed open, fingers flicking across Chaz's cheek as they bent as far from a grip as possible. "My bad. You okay?"  
  
"Sorry. Yeah." Chaz realised his grip was much too tight and loosened it just enough to take her hand. "I'm just a little..." He shook his head. "What were you going to say?"  
  
"I'm pretty sure there was a dirty joke about two hot feds in there, but I think I dropped it and it rolled away. Never find it now." Mary shrugged. "I'm not as good as he is, but ... you still want to dance?"  
  
"Nobody's as good as he is. That's his secret superpower -- he's dances like that and he's completely immune to being hit on." Chaz laughed and pulled Mary closer. "But, I think _we_ still look pretty good."

* * *

It was after three in the morning, when they got back to Mary's hotel, where they clashed vividly with the ambiance, as they crossed the lobby, attracting the attention of the desk clerk and security. Mary pulled out her key card and Chaz had a few quiet words with the guard. Reid had some suspicions about how quickly the situation was resolved, but he said nothing, stepping into the elevator behind the two of them. They were happy, and he wondered how long that would last.  
  
At the door, Mary invited them in, but Chaz begged off. "I'm sweaty and gross and cold, and I really just want to get home and take a hot shower."  
  
Mary opened her mouth and Chaz raised his eyebrows at her. Reid could see the ideas pass between them like a telegraph, far more obvious than he was accustomed to seeing on Chaz's face, but that was because Chaz's face was rarely involved when the two of _them_ were having these sorts of exchanges. Mary still had to read his _face_ , and Chaz went out of his way to make it clear.  
  
"Call me when you drag yourself out of bed, and I'll bring donuts, so you don't have to go foraging," Chaz offered, with an apologetic smile.  
  
"Gotta love a man who brings me donuts." Mary grinned and opened the door. "I'll see you tomorrow. Both of you, right?"  
  
Chaz winked and cocked his head at Reid. "He just needs to get out more."  
  
Reid sputtered for a moment. "You know, I _have_ a boyfriend! I _could_ be seeing him!"  
  
"Yeah, but you're not, and we both know it."  
  
"It's been lovely seeing you again," Reid said to Mary, with a nod, before he turned and walked back toward the elevator, leaving Chaz standing in the hall.  
  
"I'm ... gonna..." Chaz gestured awkwardly after Reid. "Call me tomorrow!"  
  
Reid didn't say another word until they were in the car.  
  
"She likes you."  
  
"I don't know about _that_ ," Chaz scoffed, and Reid caught just a flicker of the churning guilt and desire just below the surface. "She _wants_ me. She's curious about me. But, likes me? Nah. Not yet."  
  
"No, you _hope_ she doesn't, but she does. She also thinks we're _dating_. I attempted to disabuse her of that notion on at least some level. I don't think we've ever gone on a date, unless this counts, and I'm pretty sure I was just the chaperone, here." Reid watched the city out the window. "Eventually, she's going to have to know."  
  
"One thing at a time. She doesn't get to like me until she knows what an absolute bastard I am. And we can't tell her that until we're sure who she is, because the impact isn't going to land properly." Chaz sighed. "Am I taking you home, or are you still worried about the press?"  
  
"The real question is do you want me to go home with you, so you don't have to sneak me out again, tomorrow?"  
  
"That's certainly _a_ reason I'd like you to come home with me, but do you want to stop for clothes or are you going to be okay in mine?"  
  
"We spent that entire case in Nebraska with a grand total four pairs of underwear between us. I'm pretty sure I'll live, if we don't stop." Reid covered a yawn and kept talking through it. "Honestly, if I have to hike in through the steam tunnels, I'm staying. I haven't had enough coffee to do that two more times."  
  
"You're lucky I am you, because that was incoherent."  
  
"Do you see how tired I am? I haven't had any caffeine in ten hours, and I've been drinking. I'm pretty much going to melt. You might have to carry me up the stairs."  
  
There was something underneath that, and Chaz didn't quite catch it. He was sure if Reid was any less tired, he wouldn't have noticed at all. "You want to unpack that for me?"  
  
"I'm just thinking about your bed. I've been sleeping in the chair for weeks, and it's great, but I've been missing complete horizontality. There are days I'd prefer the couch, but not until my spine stops threatening to move out and take the coffee maker." Reid yawned again, staring out the window as if expecting to see something that wasn't there.  
  
"Just think, you can lie flat on your back, while I tend to your every--" Chaz could feel the way Reid's lips tightened. "Bollinger?"  
  
"Not yet, but I swear if he followed us, I'm going to get out of the car and put my fist through his windshield. I'm really not given to displays of violence, but we've gotten to that point, and I'm at the absolute limits of my sanity with this entire situation. There's a restraining order. He's been arrested for taking photos through my windows. And he just keeps showing up, but now just far enough away that it's almost impossible to get someone there before he's gone. I've done all the right things, and as we both know, that pretty much never actually works. I'm almost glad it's just a photographer, this time? I have no reason to believe I'm ever going to have to worry about Bollinger trying to shoot me... or ... Langly... but, it's not really as comforting as you'd think! I know Langly's been trying to make sure I don't see the tabloids. I know they're trying to control how bad this gets, but it's just a matter of time before legitimate publications decide to question my role in the West arrest because I was arrested for murder. Never mind that I was exonerated, because I _didn't do it_."  
  
"That's not actually what you're worried about, is it?" Chaz could feel the edges of that concern curling under the pressure of something that bothered Reid even more.  
  
"I have done things in my life that I'm not proud of, and I really don't want to talk about them. And more than that, I don't want to see any of them in the Post. But, West's crimes are of national significance, if not global significance, given his misuse of military resources in Central America, so the three of us and Paul Asher are going to be completely taken apart, piece by piece, as this drags on. Frank can't afford that. I can't afford that. Your _unit_ can't afford that. We are in a really bad position, and one Bollinger can make a lot worse, particularly because I have no idea what Narcisse actually knows, given how deep we know she went just setting up Vanity. _She dug up Langly's grave_."  
  
"Okay, but? If she knew what you're worried about, she'd have used it, by now," Chaz pointed out.  
  
"Not necessarily. Almost everything about me that's available to _Langly_ , the Bureau already knows, whether or not it made it into my official file. Like, the last time I got kicked out of a casino? I think JJ might have been there for that. Narcisse has been trying to get me _fired_ , up to this point. The West trial is going to give her another approach. She can just air my dirty laundry in public and make the Bureau complicit." Reid made a frustrated noise and rubbed his face. "I don't want to talk about this. We were having a nice night. You have a very appealing bed that I'm looking forward to sleeping in."  
  
"Just sleeping?"  
  
"Chaz?"  
  
"Hm?"  
  
"I _am_ going to fall asleep before you. Plan appropriately, so we don't have any more accidents."  
  
Chaz nodded. "Not the answer to the question I was asking."  
  
"It's not going to be the first time I've fallen asleep in the middle of something enjoyable, and given your and Langly's apparently insatiable desire for me, probably not the last," Reid teased, his face following Chaz's smile.  
  
"You know, if you tried actually sleeping on purpose, occasionally..."  
  
"Says the man driving across the bridge at a quarter past three," Reid shot back.  
  
"I never said I was any good at it, but I've heard rumours that it helps with things like that." Chaz nodded sagely, his amusement blatant at the very corner of his mouth as they passed under another streetlight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song in the background, here, is Coil's _[Love's Secret Domain](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZhpIDs_VQ4)_.


	10. Chapter 10

Somewhere around dawn, Hafidha came down the stairs to find Chaz curled up on the kitchen floor with his head in Reid's lap, as Reid fed him raspberry truffles. The orange juice sat open on the counter behind them and the protein powder was knocked over, next to it.  
  
"He gonna live?" Hafidha asked, stepping over Reid's leg to open the fridge.  
  
"Yeah. I don't know about _me_ , but he should be okay." Reid stroked Chaz's hair with the hand not covered in melted chocolate.  
  
Chaz swallowed and tried to turn his head far enough to see Hafidha. "Hey, can you get him a cup of coffee?"  
  
"You been crying, little brother?" Hafidha stepped back and crouched down, giving Reid a concerned look, before she poked Chaz in the nose. "You sound like you've been crying."  
  
Chaz smiled weakly. "Hypoglycaemia."  
  
"He's full of shit," Reid pointed out. "It's an accurate statement, but it's not the answer to your question."  
  
Hafs wiggled her fingers like she meant to pull a rabbit out of the hat none of them had. "It's about a girl, and if he wasn't hypoglycaemic, drunk, or both, he'd be sulking instead of crying. How am I doing?"  
  
"I hate you," Chaz muttered around another truffle. "And her name is Mary."  
  
"Frank's going to have the results of the first tests in a couple of hours. The extended sequence is still going to be a couple of days, but we're going to be able to tell if there was a mistake, the first time, just from this one. The other one's really just more in-depth," Reid explained.  
  
"And then she's going to kill you, because you didn't tell her." Hafidha nodded. "I can see that being a problem. I'm going to have to tell her if she hits you more than once, I'm getting involved."  
  
Chaz rolled his eyes. " _Thanks_."  
  
"You want me to microwave the chicken for you, or do you think you can get by on truffles?" Hafidha asked, noticing how few truffles were left in the bag.  
  
"I think I can sit up." Chaz didn't move.  
  
"You want to hold the fork?" Hafidha asked Reid.  
  
"You want to get me a coffee, while you're up?" Reid cleared his throat. "My leg's asleep, and I've been awake since about this time _yesterday_."  
  
"I'm getting up," Chaz insisted, still not actually doing so.  
  
"Sure you are, Chazzie." Hafidha stood up and opened the fridge. "You want breakfast?" she asked Reid.  
  
"I know we're supposed to bring Mary a box of donuts, at some point, but..."  
  
Hafidha nodded. "That's a yes. Anything I shouldn't feed you?"  
  
"Dairy," Chaz muttered against Reid's thigh, where his face was a mere inch from the hand he was considering pushing himself up with.  
  
"You know perfectly well I can--"  
  
"I know perfectly well what I'm making for lunch. Trust me. I know you have limits, and my baked ziti should be one of them," Chaz warned, still trying to find the motivation to sit up. He _could_. He just didn't really _want_ to.  
  
"I thought you were improving on Frank's mac and cheese casserole." Hafidha leaned over both of them to get to the microwave.  
  
"I couldn't buy enough of the sharp cheddar I like, but they had the good mozzarella. Besides, it's probably rude to tell someone they have a twin brother and you cook better than he does."

* * *

"Hey, get up."  
  
A dirty sock bounced off Chaz's forehead, and he groaned, squinting and blinking across where Reid was curled up against his bare chest. Langly. In his bedroom. At... what the hell time even was it? He reached or his phone to make sure he hadn't missed Mary's call yet. "Why are you here?"  
  
Reid made a disgruntled sound and squinted up at Langly. "Come to bed."  
  
"It's after ten, what the hell are you still doing in bed?" Langly glanced around the room, finally noticing something was not quite right, here. "Laundry on the floor...? You feeling all right, Reid? You didn't throw your back out again, did you?"  
  
"I have made a mistake, and now I am suffering," Reid intoned, faint irritation in his voice. "But, no, it's not my back. We didn't get in until about three-thirty, and I don't think we got to bed before... eight? And I was running on a total of four cups of coffee and three hours of sleep in the preceding twenty-something hours, when we went to bed. So... why are you standing here, and is it because you missed me and wanted to come keep me warm?"  
  
"Shit. You hallucinating yet?" Langly sat on the edge of the bed and reached out to curl his fingers around Reid's hand, against Chaz's chest.  
  
"No, but I will be in a couple of hours, if you don't get me a pint of espresso shots. Why am I awake, Langly?"  
  
"If you're getting him coffee, get me coffee, too," Chaz groaned, wondering if Mary was still sleeping. Maybe he should've just stayed with her, and to hell with it. She was already going to kick his ass, once they told her what was going on.  
  
"Maxwell's got news for us. The first round of tests came out the same as last time."  
  
Reid made an utterly agonised sound and pulled the blanket up over his head.  
  
"What the _hell_?" Chaz rubbed his face, trying to focus on anything that wasn't going back to sleep.  
  
"Donuts and coffee are on the table. You should probably get up before Rabbit and I eat them all." Langly looked longingly at the two men huddled under Chaz's very warm blankets. "... I haven't slept, either. I spent all night trying to get the photographers off your lawn."  
  
"Come to bed," Reid demanded, again, pulling on Langly's wrist.  
  
Chaz yawned. "Seriously. We don't have to be up until--" His phone rang and he looked at it. "Shit. I have to get up."

* * *

Chaz came back with Mary and another four dozen donuts, and the smell of coffee wafted over him as he opened the door. "Which one of you loves me?"  
  
"It wasn't love, it was a driving urge toward self-preservation," Reid called back, from the other end of the dining room table, where he sat with Hafidha, Frank's laptop, a scattered pile of printouts, and the three boxes of donuts that remained from the eight Langly had brought. "If it was love, I'd have made the French Vanilla."  
  
Langly was nowhere to be seen, and Chaz figured that was probably for the best, even if the guy was probably eating powdered donuts in his bed.  
  
"You must be Mary." Hafidha pointed. "You look just like Frank."  
  
"I keep hearing that." Mary laughed nervously. "You must be Chaz's sister?"  
  
"Hafidha. Is he talking shit about me again?" Hafidha rolled her eyes at Chaz. "Grab yourself a cup of coffee. The boys have some news. I'm just here for the donuts and to make sure you don't do any permanent damage to my little brother."  
  
"Is this about the thing he's not telling me?" Mary squinted suspiciously at the pages littering the table.  
  
"Yes." Chaz finally stepped past her with the donuts, piling the boxes on the table, and turning back toward the kitchen to get them both coffee.  
  
"The probably several things he's not telling you, because he's an absolute idiot who could've handled this entire situation better." Hafidha gestured to the donut boxes open between her and Reid. "Donut? We don't bite. We've already eaten."  
  
"Hafidha, please don't make this worse," Reid pleaded, snagging the last glazed chocolate.  
  
"Worse? Me? Oh, no. I'm pretty sure Chaz has made this bad enough."  
  
Chaz returned with the coffee and handed a cup to Mary. "Love you too, Hafs."  
  
"You should probably sit," Reid suggested. "If it were me, I'd want to be sitting for what we're about to tell you."  
  
"Chaz said you got the results from the first test, but the lab's still running the long one, for confirmation," Mary said as she pulled out the chair across from Reid and sat down. "It's not him, right? You didn't really find Dick?"  
  
"No... we did find Dick. You're the living proof that it's really him. But, he's not your cousin." Reid slid two pages across the table. "I'm pretty sure you'll understand those even better than I do."  
  
Mary skimmed the first sheet, nodding, and then turned to the second. She paused and looked back to the first. "What the _hell_?"  
  
"That's why we wanted fresh samples," Chaz admitted, taking the chair next to her. "The first time, when we got those results, they didn't look right. We assumed something had gone wrong."  
  
"That's not even possible! Something _is_ wrong!" Mary insisted, staring at the paperwork in horrified confusion.  
  
"So, here's the part where I make this worse." Reid cleared his throat. "He's alive. There's a grave with his name on it in Arlington, but the body buried in it isn't his, and all the DNA samples on file for him come from that body. But, with a living relative..." He cocked his head and gave her a meaningful look. "We had to make sure you were who you claimed to be, before we let you near him. Almost everyone who knows is in this room, and it's not safe for him, yet."  
  
"So, you want me to believe you found him, he's actually my mutant twin brother, he's in some kind of witness protection that you're willing to tell me about, and what, I still can't see him because it's not safe? I'm... really supposed to believe that?" Mary scoffed, folding her arms and rocking her chair back.  
  
"No, you can absolutely meet him. It's not witness protection, he just... ran afoul of Colonel West's predecessor and a few other people with long memories and a penchant for assassination." Reid rubbed the back of his neck. "He's upstairs, waiting for us to break the news."  
  
Mary stared straight through Reid for a long moment. "Chaz? When you said 'the FBI has no evidence'..."  
  
"That's exactly what I meant. You're holding the only evidence in existence."  
  
"You still expect me to believe he's my mutant twin brother..."  
  
"I'd really rather he wasn't, because that makes things incredibly weird. It was bad enough on my part when he was your cousin." Chaz stared into his coffee, wondering how long it was going to take her to flip it into his lap, and how hard it was going to be to get the stain out of the chair, after she did.  
  
"I'm going to go get your... not quite cousin," Reid decided, slipping out of his seat in the direction of the empty chairs. It was the long way around the table, but he didn't have to pass Hafidha or Mary to get to the stairs.  
  
"This is completely fucking ridiculous. Okay, joke's over, where are the cameras? Haha, you're an asshole."  
  
Chaz winced. "Yes. I am an asshole, but that's not why. We haven't gotten to the part where I'm an asshole, yet."  
  
"You telling me this festival of fuckery gets weirder?" Mary almost knocked over her chair as she stood.  
  
"Wait, wait, if you're going to hit him, let me get my camera!" Hafidha leaned back to pull her phone out of her pocket.  
  
"I dunno about weirder," Langly said, as he came across the room, Reid behind him, "but this festival of fuckery has a hell of a lot more fuck in it."  
  
Mary turned to the new voice and froze. "Holy shit."  
  
"Oh, crap." Langly stared back. "That, ah, driver's license photo doesn't do you justice."  
  
" _Dick?_ "  
  
"Not on the first date," Langly retorted.  
  
"Lies!" Reid declared from behind him.  
  
Langly suddenly backed up into Reid, with a suspicious look at Mary. "Stay away from my ankles."  
  
"That was _one time_!" Mary rolled her eyes. "And I was an awesome tyrannosaurus."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wicked cliffhanger time! I actually have another 2500 words written, and I just didn't want to wind up dropping a 5000 word chapter, so here, have... some.


	11. Chapter 11

"Jesus christ, it's really you." Langly couldn't figure out what to do with his hands, finally folding his arms and jamming his hands under them. "I take it you've met the federal fucksandwich?"  
  
"Dammit, Langly!" Chaz groaned.  
  
"Wait, _what_?" Mary looked from her cousin to Chaz.  
  
"Okay, we've arrived at why I'm an asshole." Chaz sighed and ran both hands through his hair, staring at the ceiling. " _They're_ dating. They have an extremely serious relationship with _each other_. I'm just..."  
  
"The icing on the cake," Langly filled in, when Chaz didn't look like he was going to finish the sentence. "And I like him, but he's crazy about you like Reid's crazy about me. So, I mean, I can't make this any less weird than it absolutely is right now, but if you're into him, that's not going to cause a problem with us."  
  
"My cousin is actually my weirdo mutant twin brother, and the hot fed who's into me is screwing him. Why do I never have a normal relationship? I really just need to consider celibacy, again. It was working for me." Mary took off her glasses and wiped them on her shirt, before she put them back on. "You're right. You are an asshole."  
  
"Hey, no." Langly stepped forward. "No, he's really not. He was trying to protect _me_. And obviously not from you, but you actually are you. There are people out there who are not you who would also not be afraid to pretend they were, so they could _kill me_."  
  
"I thought he was single! I thought he was actually interested in _me_ , and not some mirror image of somebody else's boyfriend!"  
  
"He... _is_ single." Reid stepped to Langly's side, making himself more visible and moving out of the direct line between Mary and the door. "He's never lied to you about that. Like I said, we don't have that kind of relationship."  
  
"My little brother is absolutely interested in you." Hafidha cut in. "I've been watching him agonise about you for weeks. You don't have to _do_ anything about that, but I just want to reassure you it's absolutely true. I ran out and got an extra half gallon of double fudge chunk, this morning, because I'm pretty sure there's no way this is going to end well, and I want to be prepared when I have to peel him off the floor again, because of his own entirely stupid decisions."  
  
"Okay, that? That was what I wasn't telling you. That was why I _told you_ , when you got here, that I couldn't be more than your friend, until you knew what was going on." Chaz stared down at the floor, between his knees, as the room spun around his head. He'd known this was coming. He'd known this was inevitable. And it still sucked.  
  
"You said it was _classified_!" Mary snapped.  
  
"Hello, standing right here!" Langly pointed at himself. "I told him not to tell you that he was boning me, until after we could tell you _who I was_. And if he said he was boning Reid, then it sounds like Reid's cheating on me, and that's even more of an asshole thing to do, and I don't want my boyfriend to sound like the kind of asshole he's not, when Villette could just sound like the kind of asshole he _is_. That's it. That's what happened here. I _am_ classified information. The Assistant Director of the fucking FBI modified the god damn records to erase me, almost twenty years ago. I mean, I helped, but it was his idea. He saved my life. And this is such a fucking secret that I'm _buried in Arlington_ , as a national hero."  
  
"Okay, this is the second time that's come up. I knew about the grave, but I just assumed it was somebody with the same name or it was photoshopped or something. Because like... _my_ cousin Dick? A national hero? I'm calling bullshit." Mary folded her arms and tipped her chin up, and Reid stepped back, where he could see her and Langly at the same time. The resemblance really was compelling  
  
"It's not bullshit. The coffins have -- _had_ , now, thanks Narcisse -- biohazard seals on them. We were exposed to some freakshow experiment that-- You know what? You should talk to Fitz about it. I bet he can figure out if we still have any records. You're a pathologist, right? You should _see this_. You'll get it if you see it." Langly rolled his eyes so hard, he thought he'd pulled something for a second. "Some complete assbag mad scientist tried to turn us into sharks or some shit. If I never spend four hours in a body bag full of my own vomit again, it'll be too soon."  
  
"Is he kidding?" Mary looked over her shoulder at Hafidha.  
  
"As far as I can tell, that's ... right about what happened. This guy had a virus made of shark genes or something that was inevitably fatal, unless you were a shark, and when he tried to infect the general populace with it, your cousin and his lunatic braintrust were right up his ass, and they almost killed themselves stopping the guy." Hafidha shrugged and turned the laptop around, pointing at the screen. "That's actually still in our files. That's one of only a handful of mentions of him, and he was absolutely reported dead at the end of it. As far as anyone knew, until... what, like May? he was actually dead and buried, which is a damn shame, because he's good. I was a fan, back in the day. Then I got better." She stuck out her tongue at Langly.  
  
Langly's shoulders pulled up as he sputtered. "Screw you. I still kicked your ass in Belmont's systems."  
  
"You cheated, when we went against Belmont!"  
  
"You're just pissed I used the system against you."  
  
Chaz squeezed his eyes shut, tempted to just let this go on, so at least the focus of the conversation would stop being himself, but they really needed to finish hammering this out, because he was pretty sure that once Mary left, she was never coming back. "Can the two of you fight over Kimmy, _later_?"  
  
Langly folded his arms and stood up straighter, eyes wide with offence at the very idea. "There is one person in the world who ever started a fight over Kimmy, and that was kind of by proxy anyway."  
  
"... _Kimmy_ Belmont? As in Belmont Computing and Networking Services, _that_ Kimmy Belmont?" Mary looked back and forth between Hafidha and Langly.  
  
"I used to know the guy, back when he still worked for other people. Then I dropped dead and he got his shit together. He always hated when I showed him up." Langly shrugged like it was no big deal. "But, in true bughunting fashion, you had a problem, and we solved your problem by giving you six other problems. I feel like we should at least address that."  
  
"I'm losing my willingness to believe you're not Dick, so mark that one off. You've got a little less hair, but have you even aged, since you left? You look ... exactly like you always did." Mary circled him curiously.  
  
"No, I don't. I weigh more and half of the difference is my ass, according to my loving boyfriend."  
  
"Your ass isn't in any of the photos."  
  
"And you've lost a lot of weight, recently," Reid reminded him.  
  
" _Anyway_ , yes, you're Joe's kid, and you were a little terror, a screaming ball of hair and teeth." Langly huffed, arms still folded. "Looks like you grew out of that."  
  
"I'm now a much larger terror," Mary assured him, easily looking him in the eyes. There was barely an inch between them. "You know I want to run my own tests."  
  
"Get a sample kit, and I'll let you take them, yourself, on one condition." Langly jabbed a finger at her. "You do not label them in any way that can ever be used to link my identity to our family."  
  
"Done." Mary shrugged, dismissively. "I can just number it. I know what it is."  
  
"One problem down, five more to go." Langly reached out and grabbed Mary's shoulders, turning her to face Chaz. "Four of them are Chaz."  
  
"Chaz is an asshole."  
  
"I tell him that all the time," Hafidha agreed, nodding. "And I'm sure he could've handled this better in any number of ways, like not flirting with you while you were a suspect in a murder investigation, but it's too late now."  
  
"I'm not going to defend myself." Chaz shrugged. "I made choices, and they were bad. And then I made choices I hoped would stop things from getting worse, but... still bad. I am not very good at this, even when it's just meeting a nice girl in a bar, who has no relation to anyone I've ever known."  
  
"His last girlfriend was a serial killer," Hafidha offered. "I like her. She's a very nice girl, and I still go to visit her sometimes. But, he never really got over the part where she tried to kill him. Mostly by accident -- she thought it wouldn't actually hurt him -- but still with intent. Most of them, though, he just fails balls as soon as he opens his mouth."  
  
"I feel like I should be offended. A _serial killer_?" Mary raised an eyebrow.  
  
"She was trying to help people. They just... kept dying. And in that case? I didn't know. And does she really count as 'girlfriend', if I only slept with her once and knew her for ... what, three days? It was an extremely complicated one-night stand I was hoping would turn into something else." Chaz kept his arms folded across his lap, hands clutching at his pants. "I found out, and then I arrested her. I liked her a lot, but..." He left out the part where a few times a year, he still thought about going up to see her, about trying again. "Some things you just can't get past. I understand that."  
  
"And I ask myself, am I really going to get a better offer?" Mary pushed her glasses up with the side of her hand, as she stretched it across her face. "I'm not making a decision, right now. You got to not tell me shit for weeks. I get to not make up my mind for a while. I'm inclined to forgive you not telling me anything. I can blame that on Dick. But, you're _boning my cousin_ , and I'm pretty sure that makes this gross."  
  
"I'd make myself the better offer, but my little brother probably already licked you, speaking of 'how about no'." Hafidha held up her hands and shook her head.  
  
Chaz looked utterly gutted at the idea, and Reid moved to his side without a thought, resting a hand on Chaz's shoulder.  
  
"I'll give him credit. It's been a no tongue affair, so far. His decision. And I get that, now. And I'm real fucking glad." Mary grimaced and turned around, jabbing a finger at Langly. "What's number six?"  
  
"I would rather not have been saved from the weird shark virus, only to get packed off to a government detention facility, so it's up to Chaz if we're telling you number six, right now. That one's not something _I_ get to make a decision about." Langly leaned to the side and raised his eyebrows at Hafidha. "Rabbit? You want an override vote on this one?"  
  
Hafidha pushed her own glasses up, tapping on the frames for a moment. "She's your cousin. She's your only living relative that we can find. If you were in Idlewood? Well, no. If you were in Idlewood, none of us would be having this conversation. But, if you end up in Idlewood now, there's a pretty good chance we'd be allowed to tell her. More than that? If you two really are twins...? You get where that sentence ends."  
  
"I think we have to tell her, because if we don't, and she... She's genetically predisposed, _because_ they're twins. She deserves the warning, and it's an excuse to get her into a room with Frost." Chaz grinned awkwardly at Mary. "She'll kill me -- Frost, I mean -- but I can probably get you in to meet her. I mean, that's... whether or not you'll ever speak to me again after today, I'm pretty sure if you want to meet her, I can make that happen, while you're in town. She already knows who you are, and you've already worked one of the weird ones, so..."  
  
"... I can be bribed. Limitedly. Make it happen, and I will at least have coffee with you one more time, so I have somebody to squeal at about it." Mary nodded to one side and then the other, staring over Chaz's head. "So, what's the dirty secret that I'm not seeing in the test results, but you're sure is there?"  
  
"We call it the Anomaly," Chaz said, taking a deep breath. "Remember when Spencer said I had a metabolic disorder? That's part of it. The other part ... probably wants a demonstration. It doesn't manifest the same way for everyone, and there's a couple different stages. Your ... I'm going with cousin. Your cousin is in the second stage, and it makes him a little weird."  
  
"Hey, screw you, I've been weird way longer than I've been a gamma," Langly snapped, straightening out of time with his breathing in a somewhat jerky motion. "We need something obvious. I'm like the opposite of obvious."  
  
Reid cleared his throat. "Hafidha? Pick a lamp you don't like."  
  
"What?" Hafidha blinked at him. "What's the lamp go-- Oh. In the-- With the-- right, ah... Take the halogen. That'll survive it. It's metal."  
  
Langly nodded, turning to face Mary, and splayed his hands in front of his shoulders. "Can you see me _and_ the lamp?"  
  
"Yeah, it's right over your shoulder."  
  
"Ok, going to do this the hard way, because it's more impressive." Langly closed his eyes and picked up Hafidha's network, instantly, following that back to his own laptop, and the power cable to the wall... Behind him, the light turned on, glowing brighter and brighter. He stayed focused, unmoving, until the power arced from the filament, melting a hole through the side of the bulb with a loud crack, the glow dimming to a red smoulder.  
  
He looked over his shoulder. "That's weirdly less satisfying than incandescents."  
  
"It's less of a mess, too," Chaz pointed out.  
  
"I'm sorry, _what_?" Mary made her way across the room to look at the lamp, stepping up on the bottom of a bookcase to see into the top without disturbing it. "I'm supposed to believe you just blew up a lightbulb with your brain?"  
  
"Just one of my many freaky talents." Langly shrugged. "It's weird as hell, but you watched me do it."  
  
"It's a carnival stunt," Mary scoffed. "If I'm supposed to believe you're a superhero or something, you're going to have to do better than that."  
  
Hafidha closed the laptop and pushed it away from herself, so there would be no questions about her own involvement, in whatever Langly chose to do next.  
  
"Phones on the table," Langly demanded, pulling out his own and reaching past Chaz to set it down. "Except you," he said to Mary, as she went to add hers to the pile. "You get to send a text to anyone you want, and I will tell you what it said and where you sent it, from over there, with my eyes closed. Stand wherever you want. It doesn't matter."  
  
"Yeah, you wish." Mary snorted. "Some kind of psychic mumbo-jumbo, and you'll be like 'oh, the general feel of the message', and pull some profiler shit."  
  
"No, he'll tell you word for word. Actually, it doesn't even have to be a text, but he's particularly skilled with telephone-related networks." Reid shrugged casually and stepped away from Mary, into a position where he couldn't accidentally see her phone. "I have watched him do things that cause me to question my admittedly-limited understanding of the interrelation between humanity and the mechanical."  
  
"Electronic," Langly corrected.  
  
Reid gestured at him. "See? Limited."  
  
Mary opened her mouth, but Langly cut her off.  
  
"You just unsubscribed from the special events notifications from... I think that's a nightclub in Omaha."  
  
"Jesus christ." Mary blinked. "I didn't even look at my phone."  
  
Langly's eyes slid over to Chaz. "Are you _sure_ she's not eating like a beta?"  
  
"That wasn't anomalous," Hafidha volunteered. "Unless her thing is knowing exactly where things are on the screen without looking, which is out of my reach."  
  
"I'm going to say the thing I didn't say about ... Mrs Fitzgerald." Chaz looked down the table at Hafidha and pointed at Langly. "Beale."  
  
"Starbucks," Hafidha agreed, nodding.  
  
Langly turned a flat look toward Mary and gestured with both hands. "They don't tell _me_ everything, either. _Feds_."  
  
Mary pointed at Langly with the hand her phone was in. "Wait, wait, he's some kind of electronic superfreak, and now you're trying to figure out if _I_ am?"  
  
"It runs in families," Chaz said, quietly, "sometimes regardless of actual contact with other family members that have it. Of course, I may also be the special case, there. We don't have enough evidence, one way or the other. But, he's got it, and ... if you get the same results we did, the two of you are some kind of mutant identical twins, which makes it more likely, at least in theory."  
  
"And that's something we need to talk about. All of us... well, okay, at least the two of _you_ need to talk about it." Reid gestured to Mary and Langly, as he sat down next to Chaz. "The idea has come up that the two of you may only be related to _each other_. That you may _not_ be related to your family, genetically. It's one of the few ways we've been able to manage a scenario that even slightly describes what we're seeing -- that you're both IVF babies from the same parents, and that some damage may have been done to the one of the embryos, in the course of implanting only _one_ of a set of twins."  
  
"Hey, it's the best explanation I've heard," Mary admitted, after a moment. "It's a lot less freaky and more realistic than most of the alternatives. That's gonna mean putting some weird-ass questions to my parents, though, and since I can't tell them _why_..."  
  
"Okay, so... tell them something _like_ the truth, but not." Langly held up his hands, anticipating the objections. "Tell them you did one of those Twenty-Three and Me tests, and you've got a brother named Frank, in Maryland. Or, you know, don't tell them shit, and we'll dig up _my_ parents instead. If we're related to my dad, we're related to _your_ dad. Which is what we're supposed to be. Which might mean you're my _mom's_ kid, not Ruthie's. I mean, that's... It's weird, but it's less weird."  
  
Mary nodded as Langly talked. "It's obvious you were the other brains in the family. I'm betting we _are_ related to _your_ parents, though, because _I_ might be young enough to be a transfer, but _you're_ not. I'll tell you what: if you can get me a sterile sample kit, I'll take the samples from you right before I get on the plane, and FedEx them to myself in York. I can probably get samples from _my_ parents easier than yours, just by going over for dinner. Mom'll be thrilled I'm actually coming home for something other than Christmas. I'll sneak the samples through the hospital lab -- I'll run them myself. I don't care -- and then we'll figure out what the hell we're looking at, and what we're going to do about it."  
  
"I like it. Let's do it." Langly stuck his hand out and Mary shook it. "If there's any grave-robbing, though, you have to call me. I'll fly out for that."  
  
"Okay, okay, because I have to ask, is it true you're a millionaire?" Mary glanced down at where she still held his hand. "I keep feeling like we're going to cause some sort of breach in the fundamental nature of reality by touching."  
  
"See, you'd think that, but I think we're the result of a fundamental breach, so it's like closing the gate after the cow." Langly laughed and took his hand back, wiping it on his jeans, just in case. "And yeah, I'm ... pretty damn rich."  
  
" _Then why the fuck is your boyfriend living in a shoebox_?"  
  
"Because I _like_ my shoebox, thank you! It is _my shoebox_. Mine, where I live, and enjoy living." Reid sounded like he'd had this argument just as many times as he actually had. "He threatened to buy me a _house_!"  
  
Langly snorted and rolled his eyes, with an exasperated hand-wave in Reid's direction. "Irresistible force met immovable object. Immovable object won. It's a _nicer_ shoebox, now. One of my ... business partners bought the building, and we've been renovating around him. You ever stick your hand under a brooding chicken? It's going about like that."  
  
Reid sputtered and turned to Chaz, who was obviously trying not to laugh.  
  
"Brooding seems out of character," Chaz said solemnly, and Reid's eyes picked up a concerning intensity, as the realisation there was going to be a punchline struck. "There's a lot more cock to you than hen."  
  
"... I know where you sleep."  
  
"That mean you're going to wake me up with a lot more cock? Am I supposed to get you to crow, in the morning?" Chaz teased, with a smile that looked like it might splinter at a touch. "'Cause you know, I would, but there's this girl..."  
  
Reid felt the grief and self-loathing wash through him, and it was like being gutted with a sandblaster, like Chaz had forgotten he was there to share it. "Do what you think is right," he said quietly. "I just want you to be happy."  
  
"You know better. I'm not the happy one." Chaz folded back into himself, leaving Reid suddenly hollow. "I'm sorry."  
  
Mary cocked her head toward Langly, watching. "There is something seriously going on with the two of them. They are so in love..."  
  
"Nah, it's weirder than that. You'll get used to the weird, if you can stand them long enough." Langly tipped his head toward Mary, the two of them in almost perfectly opposite positions. "They're not in love. They're reading each other's minds. If you listen to Reid, that totally precludes being in love, because they'd have to be able to stand _themselves_ , first."  
  
"They're what." It wasn't even a question.  
  
"If you ask Chaz, I bet he'll show you. But, not for long. Reid's the only one he can ... do _that_ with. Do it the right way, I guess. He tried it with me, one night, because I was kind of curious, and neither of us really want to repeat that experience."  
  
"The _wrong_ way." Hafidha rolled her eyes. "Pretty sure he's taking years off his life."  
  
Chaz raised his voice from the silent conversation he was having with Reid. "It's my life, and I will live exactly as much of it as I intend to, thanks for your undying concern."  
  
Langly pointed to Chaz and then Reid. "His life and his shoebox. You can see why people call them evil twins." He smiled smugly and straightened up. "Does that make us the good twins?"  
  
"Nah, we're just cousins, right?" Mary nodded slowly and smiled wryly.  
  
"You want to ditch this joint and get lunch or something, while the feds finish pulling their heads out of each other's asses?" Langly raised his eyebrows and rocked back on his heels like he was waiting for an answer before he took a step. "Brought my motorcycle. If you can deal with Reid's helmet, I can take out half the city's traffic cameras, and we can go hang out somewhere less depressing."  
  
Mary smiled like a cat eyeing a catnip fish. "Can we go to the Smithsonian?"  
  
"Only if I get lunch first."  
  
"Italian?"  
  
"I know this great little place that'll be totally empty at this hour, but the chicken parm is to die for."  
  
"Let's get the hell out of here, and you can tell me all about how some asshole kid from Saltville got to be a dead millionaire."  
  
Langly grinned. "Hey, Villette, I'm stealing your girlfriend!"  
  
"She's not my girlfriend, and you're on the rice rocket, so you have to leave me your boyfriend." Chaz nodded, making himself look up from Reid's lap. "Seems fair. Please don't do anything we're going to have to rescue you from, and if you do, you know how to reach us."  
  
"You wouldn't have to rescue me this time." Langly sounded almost offended at the very idea.  
  
"Handcuffs."  
  
"Fine, you can rescue me if there's handcuffs. Pretty sure I can take care of myself, though."  
  
"I'm worried about you taking care of you _and_ her. The cameras can't see you, but the _people_ still can. No one can connect her to us, yet, and for her sake and _yours_ I hope it stays that way."  
  
"Come on, I spent twenty-something years as an investigative journalist. I'm pretty sure I know what I'm doing."  
  
"I know you're right," Chaz finally conceded. "I'm just tired."  
  
"I'm holding your laptop for ransom," Hafidha decided, as she grabbed another donut. "Bring me back something. He's too tired to cook food anyone _else_ would want to eat."

"Extra cheese," Langly promised, pulling his keys out of his pocket, as he stepped backward toward the door.


	12. Chapter 12

Chaz managed to cook lunch, despite the boxes of donuts that still sat on the dining room table. What he didn't manage was _eating_ lunch, instead having two protein drinks and stalking up the stairs with a pair of beers shoved in his back pocket, after protesting he was just too tired to keep sitting up. Hafidha gave Reid a few boxes of donuts and sent him up after Chaz.  
  
"I wish things could have been different." Reid ran his fingers through Chaz's hair, where Chaz, now two beers down, lay tangled around him, head on his chest. "Show me what you want. Show me how I can make this hurt less."  
  
"I'll stop. I'm sorry."  
  
The ache grew dimmer, and Reid felt far more alone. "Please notice that is the opposite of what I asked you to do. I'm not worried about me. I'm here, with you, because I _want_ to be."  
  
"I don't like myself very much, right now," Chaz muttered, seriously debating whether he could manage to get back down the stairs and grab the rest of the beer without dying of exhaustion and embarrassment in the middle of the living room floor. Probably not.  
  
"I noticed that." Reid continued to stroke Chaz's hair. "Come back to me. You've made a mistake, and maybe things aren't going to go the way you hoped, with Mary, but they're not as bad as you feared, either. And, for whatever it's worth, I'm still here, and I'm not going anywhere."  
  
"Back to work on Monday," Chaz grumbled, sounding exactly as indulgently whiny as he felt.  
  
"So are you," Reid reminded him. "I'm sure the cases are just piling up without us."  
  
"Is this really what you want?" Chaz asked, changing the subject again.  
  
"There are several things you could be asking me, but I'm going to assume you're asking if I'm sure I want to share in your suffering. And frankly, no, I'd rather you weren't suffering at all, but as long as you are, we might as well bear it together. There's nothing to be gained in suffering alone."  
  
"You mean besides being alone? I heard about the time you hung up on Penny. And the other time."  
  
"If you ask me to leave, I'll go, once we've established you actually want to be by yourself, and that you're not sending me away out of some misplaced sense of guilt about inflicting yourself upon me."  
  
Chaz snorted, and Reid went on.  
  
"I'm serious! I've watched you consider it no less than five times, in the last three hours! I'm here because I like you, and I want to be with you. I'm here because I'm your friend, and I want you to know you don't have to be alone, if it's not what you _want_."  
  
"What I _want_? What I want is--" Chaz groaned and tried to pull the blanket up, before realising he was laying on it. "Never mind what I want. This entire situation has been about what I want. What do _you_ want?"  
  
"To sleep before Langly gets back and wakes us up again, like the inconsiderate ass he pretends to be, when he thinks it might end up to his benefit."  
  
Chaz groaned louder. "How exactly is waking us up going to be to his benefit?"  
  
"Because this time he's probably going to give in, when we drag him into bed with us, and then he's going to look smug about it for weeks. He's always reassured and pleasantly surprised to discover we still enjoy him."  
  
"I get that. I feel the same way about the two of you. I don't know. Maybe it made me cocky. I started thinking I could find someone I could love like you love him."  
  
"You probably can." Reid twisted his fingers into Chaz's hair. "You just... picked the wrong one, this time."  
  
"Weren't you listening to Hafs? I always pick the wrong one." Chaz rolled over and pushed himself up, hands on either side of Reid's chest, Reid's fingers caught in his hair, as Reid tried to pull away, to give him space. "You want to keep pulling my hair, before we go to sleep?"  
  
"Only if you want me to."

* * *

Somewhere around the cannoli, Mary finally counted the dishes on the table. "You really do eat like Chaz, don't you? And that thing I'm not supposed to know about is why?"  
  
"That's the short answer, yeah. The more kung fu that goes out, the more food goes in." Langly nudged the plate of cannoli toward Mary. "I don't eat as much as he does. He can't turn it off." He paused and looked up. "Not _that_ part. He's got some other stuff. He does more weird shit than a good Leatherman, and some of it's always on."  
  
"What's he like, when he's not being a dick?"  
  
"Hey, don't look at me, I like his d--" Langly's eyes rounded, his lips suddenly pressed tight together. "He's a good guy. I like him. He's kind of like having a dire wolf that puts its head in your lap and begs for table scraps. Except sexy. Dire wolves are not sexy."  
  
"He is pretty sexy. And completely self-absorbed." Mary licked the cream from one end of a cannoli, trying to figure out if if was the kind she liked.  
  
"If he was completely self-absorbed, I'd be dead," Langly admitted, after a moment's consideration. "He had a brain-fart and then tried to make up for it, with you. I get it. Reid shorted out pretty hard, too, but Reid's not... He's a little weird. _I'm_ a little weird. Villette's practically reasonable. He saw you, got a raging boner, and didn't stop to think about it until after he opened his mouth."  
  
"I think that's usually 'open mouth, insert foot', not 'open mouth, insert boner'," Mary joked around a mouthful of pastry.  
  
Langly opened his mouth and then closed it. "I'm going to spare you that image."  
  
Mary blinked, picking up her drink and loosening the ice with the straw. "There's no way he's that flexible."  
  
Langly had to think about that for a second. "I never said it was _his_."  
  
It was one of those moments Langly wished he'd gotten better at writing video formats, or even that he'd gotten faster at stills, because he wasn't sure he was going to quite capture the full, vivid glory of Mary blowing soda out her nose. One hand clapped helplessly over her mouth as she leaned to the side, trying not to cough it all over herself. Her eyes watered, and she managed a few drowning-adjacent sounds, before she grabbed her napkin and gave him the finger, with the same hand.  
  
"Lucky I'm wearing black," she croaked, blotting what she hadn't managed to dribble onto the floor.  
  
Langly offered her his napkin. "It wasn't that funny."  
  
"You weren't looking at yourself when you said it." Mary coughed and cackled, checking to make sure she'd blotted everything that might come off. "And what's Chaz's problem with you and Spencer, if he's that into dicks? Dick's dick not enough for him?"  
  
"Oh, ha. Ha ha. You think you're funny, don't you." Langly turned something that might've been a baleful eye on her, but it lacked the intensity.  
  
"I _am_ funny. You just suck at being a punchline."  
  
"Gee, I _wonder_ why." Langly rolled his eyes. "Anyway, serious question, or were you just yanking my chain because you're a goddamn Langly?"  
  
"Sort of serious?" It slowly came to Mary that everything she knew about Cousin Dick was second-hand, that she had the impressions of their family, who were all sorely disappointed in him, and sure he'd come crawling back with his tail between his legs, any day. But, he hadn't. He'd done things no one in the family had imagined he was capable of or willing to put effort into. "I don't expect you to just know, but you know better than I do. You know him. I guess I really don't."  
  
"I don't have big enough tits." Langly shrugged. "Between him and Hafs, they only talk about his ex- _girlfriends_. We're cute, but we're not really what he wants."  
  
"And ... you're ... okay with this..." Mary leaned back in her chair and squinted across the table suspiciously.  
  
"What's not to be okay with? He wants to fuck. I want to fuck. My impossibly awesome boyfriend likes him -- sometimes _they_ fuck." Langly shrugged again, this time with a bit more force and eye-rolling. "And yeah, okay, one of these days he's going to walk out on us, and I'm still going to have an impossibly awesome boyfriend. I like Villette just fine, but there's no confusion about what we are to each other. We're friends. We screw. It's great." He pointed across the table. "But, you? Tits and a PhD. You're exactly his type, from what I've picked up."  
  
"And I look like you."  
  
"Yeah, he's got a real boner for the Langly looks, god knows why. Maybe it's the Anomaly. Maybe he got dropped on his head as a kid." Langly shook his head and shrugged.  
  
"Yeah, see, that's great and all, but they're not the Langly looks. We don't look a damn thing like the Langly side of the family. When we were kids, sure, but we grew up blond and blue instead of brown and brown. The more I look at the pictures I brought, the more I can see it. We look like the neighbours. We look like half the county. But, we don't look like _Langlys_."  
  
"We're the last Langlys standing. It counts."

* * *

Warm. Chaz was warm, sweat-soaked and smouldering, the taste of powdered donuts long since replaced by the taste of Reid's sweat and skin. He was warm and wanted and aching hard, and he wasn't sure he'd ever felt this good, provided he continued to ignore the flickers of memories battering against the rug he'd swept them under, like moths at a lampshade.  
  
Reid had called him back, welcomed him back with... at first he'd wanted to call it forgiveness, but it wasn't. It was that bizarrely perfect acceptance that was so uniquely _Reid_. Sweet, but not cloying. Soft, but not smothering. A room with a place for everything, including him, just as he was. No muzzle, here. No coy side-angles to look like anything but what he was. Reid didn't know everything, and Chaz hoped he never would, but even those covered parts and broken edges fit, here. And Reid never asked about them, just as Chaz never asked about the banded boxes he couldn't quite make out. For all they both had secrets, they'd agreed upon the shape of those secrets and built around them, in this place they both belonged.  
  
Chaz swallowed and Reid arched soundlessly under him, a hand clenched with Chaz's hair wrapped tight around the fingers, so the hand stayed still, but the tension increased as Reid squeezed his fist shut. Reid didn't _pull_ , and Chaz had learned that quickly. Pulling was control, and as easily as Chaz took it, Reid was unsettled and more than a little distressed with the idea, until he'd worked out how to produce the sensation without the direction. And as little as Reid liked that sensation, himself, he was terribly fond of the shivers it sent down Chaz's spine, the way Chaz seemed to melt in his hands.  
  
And Chaz was well on his way to melting, with Reid's legs wrapped around him and that hand in his hair, with Reid in his mind and his mouth. Nothing like this had been part of the plan, this wasn't the life he'd imagined himself living, when he'd still had hopes and dreams of a future in which he could be more than just content. But, he'd given up almost all of that. None of it belonged to him, any more. None of those were things he could have. This _was_ , at least until one of those secrets clawed its way out from under the rug, and Reid figured out that he really _was_ a monster, however well he'd hidden it so far.  
  
But, for now, with Reid's ecstatic joy ringing through his bones, he could be happy with what he had, for as long as it lasted. For as long as he could hold off the echoes of the life he'd dreamed of, a decade ago. And when Reid held him like this, it almost felt like love. He wondered if he could convince himself that licking up the echoes of Langly was good enough. He was too tired to be ashamed of how good it felt. It was more than he'd hoped for in a very long time.  
  
Tomorrow. The pain would come back, tomorrow.

* * *

"Where did you even get these? These photos are terrible!" Langly looked nothing short of mortified as he sat on the stiff, gold sofa and paged through one of the photo albums Mary had brought.  
  
"When Aunt Helen died, there was all kinds of crap my parents didn't want. And crap they never saw, because I snuck it out in the middle of the night. I took all your shit. Uncle Pete threw out almost everything, I guess, right after you disappeared, but Aunt Helen hid some stuff in the attic." Mary leaned closer, tapping a photo of teenage Langly with a screwdriver in his teeth and cord wrapped around both hands, standing on a fence, staring into the sky. The house loomed in the background. "They didn't sell the farm, you know. My parents couldn't get a good price on it, so they put it in a trust for me. Pass on the tax burden to the next generation or some shit. I don't know why they think it'll sell later if it didn't sell when they first put it up."  
  
Langly nodded slowly, turning the page and feeling the bile rise in his throat at the sight of himself in places he hadn't seen in thirty-something years. There was a reason he was always drunk in Nebraska. "You get my Ramones poster?"  
  
"The one that looks like you taped it back together after it went through the shredder? Yeah, actually, I did. Couldn't figure out why Aunt Helen didn't throw it out." Mary elbowed him. "You gonna tell me the story?"  
  
Langly shrugged, trying not to think too hard about it. The thought of going home, of being home, still made him queasy. "Dad wasn't a fan. I dunno, I did something stupid, and he tore it off the wall and ripped it up. I got a roll of tape, because fuck him. I'm surprised he didn't set it on fire, when I left."  
  
"I'm surprised you didn't take it with you."  
  
"I left it as a reminder. I figured I could get a new one when I got to civilisation. It was kind of symbolic of why I left." Langly's knuckles whitened on the edge of the album, and he let his eyes unfocus so he wouldn't have to see the photos. "They weren't bad people. I'm pretty sure of that. I just wasn't the kid they wanted to have, and they didn't really know what to do with me. They _wanted_ a kid, just... a different one. One that made sense, I guess. One that _liked cows_."  
  
"Cows seemed to like you just fine." Mary snorted and reached for the other book, flipping through it until she found the picture of young Langly, getting his brush-cut hair licked by a cow.  
  
"That was the worst day of my life right up until ... one of the times I got arrested. Wasn't Baltimore. Somewhere in New Jersey, maybe? I don't remember." Langly shook his head, looking notably grey-green, as he stared at the cow in horror. "Mom and dad thought it was hilarious. I thought I was going to smell like cow spit for the rest of my very short life, because I was also pretty sure I was going to have a heart attack and die. So, of course, mom took pictures. I hated that day. I hated that cow."  
  
"Did you like _anything_ about Nebraska?"  
  
"Why, do _you_? Come on, it was hicks, dumb hicks, cows, and corn, as far as the eye could see." Langly snorted and took the opportunity to look at Mary, instead of the photos in their laps. "Everything I liked, I took with me. Except mom's cookbook, but I didn't know I wanted that, until it was too late."  
  
"You cook. _You_." Mary leaned aside, eyeing Langly suspiciously.  
  
"Hey, there's a lot of things you don't know about me, okay?" Langly huffed and sat back, slamming his foot on the crossbar of the coffee table as he stretched his legs out, ankles crossed. "So, yes. I cook. And whatever the hell Villette says, I make casseroles _properly_."  
  
"Wait, are you telling me you could make Aunt Helen's tater tot casserole?" Mary's eyes rounded and her lips tightened into something that expected to become a smile. "What about the kugel? Tell me you can make kugel like she did."  
  
"Tater tot casserole's not even hard--"  
  
"Yeah, but does it taste like _Aunt Helen's_?"  
  
Langly looked down at himself, spotted the photo album, and looked back up, dizzy with the reminder of things he tried not to think about. "You tell me. How many days are you here?"

* * *

Chaz woke to a dark room, night having fallen while he slept in Reid's arms. Reid, who didn't like the dark, and Chaz mentally kicked himself for not having turned on the bathroom light before they'd gone to bed, but it had still been light out, then. And that failure leaned in like an elbow to the kidney. It might have been the Anomaly. It might have been him. He wasn't sure the distinction really mattered, in his case, like it did for some people.  
  
He considered his position, and whether he could get a light on, before Reid woke up. They were pressed close, bare skin slicked with sweat everywhere they touched, but Chaz's feet were still cold. The heat was on and the blanket was warm enough to sweat under, but his feet? There was no help for that. There was probably also no way he was going to be able to get up without waking Reid, whose arms remained wrapped around him, one hand on his hip and the other splayed across one of the scars on his back. And he found he didn't mind Reid's hand there, but Reid was going to mind waking up in the dark.  
  
Finally, he twisted back, hoping he could get a couple of inches out of Reid's arm, before the motion woke him. His back cracked in three places and his shoulder sounded like a peppermill, but he managed to grab his phone and thumb the button that would turn on the flashlight, before he dropped the phone into a donut box on the floor, trying to put it back on the nightstand. At least it landed the right way up, the light illuminating that side of the room at an angle Chaz didn't much like, but at least it wasn't _dark_. He huffed and rolled back over to find Reid watching him, amused and confused.  
  
"I missed something," Reid decided, subtly inviting Chaz back into his mind, now that they were both awake.  
  
"I forgot to turn on the bathroom light, before we passed out. I didn't want you to wake up in the dark."  
  
"You are not thoughtless, even in pain." Reid spoke quietly, but clearly, even though he knew he didn't have to speak at all. "This is not a surprise to either of us, but I think you need to be reminded someone else can see it."  
  
Chaz groaned and buried his face against Reid's shoulder. "Thoughtless? Probably not. Definitely reckless."  
  
"You say to the man who pursued a pair of murderers into the Mexican desert, in a rental car, while drugged, with no backup." Reid curled the arm still around Chaz's waist, pulling him closer again. "I think it only counts as reckless when there actually _is_ a better plan."  
  
"No, I mean, I'm thinking of taking a couple of days to go throw myself off cliffs and clear my head." Chaz lifted his head just far enough to nibble at the top of Reid's shoulder. "I fucked up pretty bad, this time."  
  
"I don't know that I'd really say you fucked up."  
  
"Not to say that I don't enjoy being in bed with you, because it absolutely ranks in my top ten list, and pretty close to the top, but I'm in bed with _you_ , and not the woman of my dreams. I fucked up. I'm ... I don't think she's too intent on even talking to me, at this point."  
  
"There was no way that was going to work, and that was true before you ever met her. The first time you slept with Langly, you nailed that door shut, and that was months before you even knew who she was," Reid reminded him. "She _told you_ that. I don't think you get to count this as _you_ fucking up. Maybe things would have been a little smoother, if you'd been a little less intensely flirtatious, but she _trusted_ you, and we were able to give Langly back some part of his family. She'd been _looking_ for him. You made that happen for both of them."  
  
"Net result: the good guys win again; Villette still single. As usual."  
  
"At what point does _being_ two people become incompatible with declaring oneself single?" Reid teased, and Chaz laughed for a moment, before he suddenly swallowed it.  
  
"I'm not in love with your boyfriend."  
  
"And I'm not in love with you. I still care about you very deeply." Reid failed to get his lips out of the way of a small amused sound that broke against the inside of them. "I'd kick a guy in the face for you."  
  
"Oh, shit. Please don't. I don't want to have to clean that up again." Chaz laughed tiredly, pressing his face against Reid's neck.


	13. Chapter 13

By the time Chaz and Reid descended, the house was filled with the smell of food and the sound of laughter. Reid was fairly sure he could smell turkey and onions, and one of those voices was definitely Langly's. Another resolved as Hafidha's just as Chaz stopped in the middle of the stairs, and Reid walked straight into his back.  
  
"I don't think I should be here," Chaz said, before Reid could ask.  
  
"It's your house. You live here."  
  
"Your boyfriend is cooking dinner for his cousin in _my kitchen_ , no doubt courtesy of Hafidha's hospitality and perpetual desire to let someone else cook."  Chaz turned like he meant to go back upstairs and shut himself in his room, for the rest of the night, but Reid stood directly in his way.  
  
"She knows you live here, and she _came back_. If you have any hope of regaining some kind of friendship, here, it's going to be by going downstairs and acting like this is a pleasant surprise."  
  
"Langly is cooking _in my kitchen_ ," Chaz protested again. "I'm pretty sure he's not expecting us to suddenly wake up and come to dinner. He's here because Hafs told him I was too tired to cook, so what the fuck am I doing awake. And really, that's a good question. What the fuck _am_ I doing awake?"  
  
"You've eaten nothing but four dozen donuts, two protein drinks, and a couple of beers, since the truffles. You're awake because if you don't eat actual food, you're going to die."  
  
"I had some chicken!" Chaz protested, vaguely remembering ... breakfast? Dinner? Whatever the hell meal he'd sort of eaten before he tried to sleep the first time.  
  
Reid nudged him with one knee. "And now you'll have some casserole. I'm not sure what he's cooking, but if it smells like that I can almost guarantee it's coming out of the oven in your lasagne pan. If nothing else, you should move because _I'm_ hungry."  
  
Chaz sighed, shook his head, and backed down the stairs. "Fine. If _you're_ hungry, I should probably eat. But, you have to save me from Hafs and Mary, when they try to take over the world. Or at least when they start talking shit about me. I'm slightly serious. Hafs can get a little nasty."  
  
"You're afraid she's going to use Mary to go after you, and set her off, in the process, because this has been an extremely ... exciting weekend." Reid put together the parts Chaz wasn't saying and his own observations of the way Hafidha looked at him the day they met, looked at Langly after the Belmont Computing thing.  
  
"That is exactly what I'm worried about. And I'm aware it's a fucking stupid concern, at this point." Chaz snorted. "Fine, I'm worried because _I'm_ clearly having one of those days, and that would just be... That would really just be the day I'm having. It's unlikely, _but_..."  
  
"Always better to be prepared, no matter how remote the possibility. She's related to Langly, and she's just spent a couple of days with you and then him. Predisposition and exposure. And yesterday was a bit of a shock. Trauma."  
  
"You're learning." Chaz nodded, trying to get his face to approximate friendliness instead of nausea, as he ran out of stairs.  
  
Reid kissed Chaz's cheek as he squeezed by, leading the way into the kitchen, where three people already waited. "Hey." He lingered in the doorway and raised a hand in greeting, elbows in, neck bent, relying on years of awkwardness to make him look non-threatening. "Who's cooking? Something smells good."  
  
"I should be offended you can't tell my cooking from the smell alone." Langly rolled his eyes and slid down from the edge of the counter he was sitting on. "I promised Rabbit I'd bring food and Mary talked me into making my mom's tater tot casserole, so I figured I could do both of those things at the same time. Where's Villette?"  
  
"About a foot behind me, trying to decide that eating is a better idea than hara kiri. Please tell him I'm right." Reid stepped into the room, around a cabinet, and tried to avoid getting in the way. Even with four people in the kitchen, it wasn't that difficult, which did make him consider the state of his own kitchen, which was just large enough for one person, no matter how many times Chaz and Langly tried to cook over each other's shoulders.  
  
"Chazzie, come have a cheese sandwich before you die." Hafidha rolled her eyes and opened the fridge, pulling out the cheap swiss and the last of the sourdough rolls from two days ago. "This is the last of the bread, by the way."  
  
"I'll bake after ... dinner? Is this dinner?" Chaz rubbed his eye and settled for looking like he'd been kicked out of bed and rolled down the stairs, which was about how he felt, despite finally having slept.  
  
"You don't look so good," Langly said, one arm around Reid and a dishtowel in his other hand.  
  
"So, I'll eat something that's not a donut, and then I'll look better. I think I missed a meal, somewhere. It's not serious. I'm just ... _tired_." The yawn was massive, but instead of covering it, Chaz mashed his wrist against his eye, hoping to stop the dizziness. He couldn't be sure how much of that was not eating and how much was related to the sinking feeling in his stomach. When he opened his eyes and saw Mary watching him, it took actual effort not to turn around and go back to bed. "I called Dr Frost. You have... kind of an appointment with her on Monday. She knows who _he_ is from way before I met him and I let her know that you know, too, so if the two of you want to go together, she's interested enough to repeat the tests for her own amusement. Like I said, her speciality is weird shit. Really, broadly, _weird_ shit. She can spot an anomalous death almost every time."  
  
"So, when you called her from the hospital..."  
  
"Can't talk about the case. Business. I told you everything I could, right before we left." Chaz shook his head.  
  
"You call the ME who specialises in anomalous deaths and then you fly out with a girl in critical condition who's got a disorder nobody's got a name for, but you say you know somebody else who had it." Mary squinted up the last few inches between them.  
  
"Can't talk about it. I will neither confirm nor deny, but I will introduce you to Dr Frost."  
  
"You told her about the tests." It wasn't a question.  
  
"I did. I needed an opinion I could trust. But, I didn't reveal who I was talking about. That's up to you. She's very interested, and entirely convinced we've stepped into something with a rational and human explanation -- some kind of error or fraud. Because to the best of her knowledge, what we're seeing is impossible. But, you don't have to worry about telling her anything she shouldn't know -- she signed your cousin's death certificate, and then visited in him in the hospital, after he got electrocuted."  
  
Mary elbowed Langly, who was deeply engaged in his appreciation of Reid.  
  
Langly broke the kiss after the second elbow. " _What_?"  
  
"Electrocuted? What'd you grab?"  
  
"Well, I didn't grab my ass to kiss it goodbye." Langly huffed, one hand on Reid's chest as he turned to look at Mary without breaking contact. "Some asshole decided he could get me to tell him where to find Reid and Villette, along with some friends of ours, if he took a car battery to my ass. Some asshole didn't know me very well."  
  
Mary stared at him for a long moment, trying to figure out if he was joking, before she glanced over at Hafidha, who closed the oven, trying to pretend she hadn't just been poking the casserole to see if it was done.  
  
"Oh, no. I was there for that one. You couldn't shut him up, but I don't think he said a single thing anyone could use, beyond establishing that he's probably banging everyone for two states in any direction." Hafidha rolled her eyes and shook her head.  
  
"Which I'm _not_ ," Langly clarified, sounding moderately offended. "I have a hot boyfriend and my hot boyfriend's evil twin, and I'm good."  
  
Mary blinked, staring at Langly, and then looked up at Chaz. "You trying to complete the set? Other hot boyfriend's evil twin? Because no."  
  
"I'm okay with no!" Langly turned, switching places with Reid. "The two of you and your weird mind-reading shit are hot. That would not be. That would be like me and the Black Queen, only grosser."  
  
Chaz looked even more horrified than Langly, somehow, his mouth just flapping soundlessly until words finally fell out of it. "Ah, no. No, I really wasn't. Any interest I may have in you is ... just... you. And me. And... not actually them."  
  
"And this seems okay to you?" Mary asked, eyeing Reid.  
  
"He's my friend. What matters to me is that he's _happy_." Reid smiled, but his eyes looked tired. "Not that I think either of us get the traditional happy ending, but if you can even pass happiness and wave, on the way, I'm pretty sure it counts."  
  
Mary's eyebrow arced up as her eyes slid back to Langly. "Are these two always this cheerful?"  
  
Hafidha choked on a laugh and nudged Chaz in the back with a plate full of sandwich. "Spencer's the happy one. Trust me; I live with Chaz."  
  
"Thanks, Hafs." Chaz turned far enough to snatch the plate. "Really selling me, there."  
  
"They're feds." Langly shrugged and crossed the kitchen to get the casserole out of the oven. "They hunt serial killers. I'm pretty sure you lose a certain amount of faith in humanity, somewhere in there."  
  
"The first time a killer mails you a trophy, you start learning to reframe your life," Reid agreed, leaving out the part where neither of them had lived enviably before things like that started happening. Better to blame it on the job.  
  
"I'm pretty sure this isn't why you think a kitchen is a luxury." Mary eyed him over her glasses, which slid down as her ears lifted, firming up the stern look Reid was sure he'd seen on Langly more than once. "That's still fucked up."  
  
"You don't want to hear about why, and we don't want to talk about it," Chaz said, through a mouthful of sandwich, saving Reid the trouble. "It's not dinner table conversation."  
  
"They're both a little weird about food." Langly shrugged and gestured at the pan. "Speaking of which, come here and tell me if this is what you remember. You've eaten the original more recently than I have."  
  
"Did you get her recipe?" Mary finally thought to ask, reverently taking the spoon Langly offered her and lifting the first melty bite straight from the pan, blowing on it. "I thought you said you didn't get her cookbook."  
  
"I didn't. It's from memory. Same with the jalapeño fritters."  
  
"Eww. The what now?" Mary waited for the spoonful of potato glop to cool down enough to put into her mouth.  
  
"I'm with her." Chaz shook his head. "Jalapeños? Serranos have a much better flavour for that kind of thing."  
  
Reid snorted, leaning against the corner of the pantry. "Okay, I actually like the jalapeño fritters, but if you want to talk about swapping the peppers, look toward the Rio Grande. Hatch doubles."  
  
Chaz eyed him long enough to swallow. "Red or green?"  
  
"Green. Red's hotter, but I think the flavour of the green is innately better for deep frying."  
  
"Double X? Really?" Chaz shook his head. "They're so thin. They don't have the juiciness, the mouthfeel of a good serrano."  
  
Hafidha looked at Mary, who was watching the argument over her shoulder. "They're from Nevada. They like to pretend their opinions on chiles matter."  
  
Mary finally put the spoon in her mouth. A series of hot cheese impaired sounds that might've been 'oh my god' followed, as she chewed, one hand gripping the counter until her knuckles were white.  
  
"That bad, huh?" Langly asked, wondering where he screwed it up.  
  
Mary stared at him, slightly dazed, as she came to terms with what she'd just put in her mouth. "If I had any doubts left about who you are, who you _were_ , they're gone. That's it. That's _exactly_ it. It's Aunt Helen's tater tot casserole."


	14. Chapter 14

Too many people were waiting, when they got off the elevator. Too many people from _both_ sides of the floor. And then Chaz spotted the cake in Garcia's hands.  
  
"I would hug you, both of you, but I have a cake in my hands, and I am very worried about Reid's back." Garcia shoved the cake at Brady, who caught it and levelled it before the edge of the chocolate icing hit his shirt. "Are you okay? Tell me you're okay."  
  
"I'm okay," Reid assured her, looking over the crowd gathered in the hall. "Really. I even took an extra two days, just to make sure."  
  
"So Frank could make sure _for_ you," Chaz teased, knowing he'd done more testing of Reid's back than Langly had, over the weekend, with Mary in town.  
  
"How the hell would you know?" Duke asked from where he stood between Rossi and Falkner, obviously halfway through another wild story.  
  
"Because Frank's so loud we needed earplugs on the other side of the river." Chaz pointed at Hafidha. "Ask Hafs! It's completely true!"  
  
"Don't ask me anything." Hafidha reached over and plucked an icing rosette off the cake, waiting to see if Chaz would go for it before she got it into her mouth. "I am not getting in the middle of this."  
  
Reid cleared his throat. "Why don't we adjourn to somewhere other than the hall? That cake looks heavy."  
  
"Oooh," Lau watched Reid pick a direction and stride off that way, looking distracted and professorial. "He's good!"  
  
"He's got almost no tells." JJ shook her head and rolled her eyes. "If you can figure out what he's thinking, it's probably because he wants you to know."  
  
"Our scary genius reads like a book."  
  
"Have you considered," Chaz asked, falling in behind her, as they all followed Reid, "that's because I _like_ you?"  
  
"You're less paranoid," Lau decided, after a few steps of staring contemplatively at Reid's back. "Liking us actually means something. Gotta wonder what he's trying to hide, and at the same time, gotta wonder if I want to know."  
  
"Oh, you don't," Garcia assured her. "Trust me. You really don't. And that's just the parts I know about. And I only know about them, because I was _there_."  
  
Lau eyed Chaz curiously.  
  
"Agent Reid is an incredibly private person, and I have done my best to respect that." Chaz tried not to look defensive, as he shrugged, and he might even have succeeded.  
  
"Uh-huh. Which is why you two share a room, every time you end up on the same case." Lau looked unconvinced.  
  
"Unlike some people, I can be trusted to neither ask questions nor tell stories." With a thin smile, Chaz flicked a glance toward Duke's back. "We understand each other."  
  
"Vegas boys," Garcia whispered loudly.

* * *

"You all right, out here?" Mary asked, coming out of Frost's office, to where Langly was crouched on the floor with his head between his knees and Frost's rubbish bin beside him.  
  
"I'm not so good with corpses," he finally admitted. "Mostly actual being in the room with a dead body, but every once in a while, the photos will do it. You do this shit for a living, and so does that crazy old witch, in there, but you couldn't pay me enough to watch another autopsy. Probably not even if it was aliens, which is really saying something, because there was a time in my life I'd have given my left nut and maybe my right one and definitely whatever I had for breakfast to see an alien autopsy, but I'm getting too old for this shit."  
  
Mary cocked her head and blinked down at her cousin. "That's what that was. Your boyfriend kept looking at me funny, while I was talking about the cause of death on that case. Because, you know, we're standing over two of the bodies and I'm pointing out what I'm talking about, and he's right there just... watching me like he's waiting for something to happen. It's _you_. I thought he was just another fucking sexist asshole, but he was wondering if it ran in the family, wasn't he?"  
  
Langly chuffed in amusement, head still between his knees. "Probably."  
  
"Do you want to tell her what's going on? Let her run the samples here?" Mary asked, glancing down to make sure the door had closed behind her.  
  
"No. Reid and Villette, I'll trust. I trust Villette because I don't really have a choice, but he's proven he's not interested in screwing me figuratively, just literally. But, I'm not putting a DNA sample in the hands of an FBI lab, courtesy of someone who knows enough to turn that into a problem."  
  
"Thought you weren't wanted for anything by the FBI."  
  
"I'm not. It's not the Fibbies I'm worried about. And it's sure as hell not the bench warrant for an unpaid traffic ticket in Buttfuck, Wisconsin." Langly pushed himself to his feet, back still pressed against the wall. "I'm a little more concerned about the number of people with easy access to the Federal Bureau of Incompetence databases. Our heroes have good tech teams, but the rest of the Bureau, I know sixteen-year-old kids who could sneeze and accidentally hack."  
  
"Then, ah, come in and thank her for your new life, and let's get the hell out of here, before you pass out and hit your head on the linoleum."

* * *

"Gentlemen, let me be the first to tell you what you already know," Prentiss said, picking up a paper plate with a small slice of German chocolate cake. "It's official: you're not fired, and there will be no reprimand. I don't know how you managed it, and I don't want to know, but all the evidence presented is verifiable and while your tactics may not have been the preferred method, they're technically by the book. West hasn't recanted, either, so there's not going to be a prolonged trial -- the man's guilty of treason, and all that remains, now, is sentencing."  
  
"I expect there's still pushback from the Air Force on that point." Reid covered his mouth to talk around a mouthful of cake. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't _Chaz's_ cake.  
  
Rossi shook his head and swallowed. "Not as much as you'd think. The Congressional committee investigating Asher's reports has them on a short leash, and they're about ready to cut West loose, just to wash their hands of him. The brass would rather sentence him, and they'll make a show of being reluctant to pass on that, but regardless of the actual reason, it's going to have to look like they want to impose a stiffer punishment than the federal courts."  
  
"So, basically, we still don't know if Helmsman was actually the top of this ... _project_ , or if someone else knowingly okayed it." Reid stuck his fork in the cake he held in his other hand, so he could pick up his coffee.  
  
Chaz gave him a long look, and Duke caught it, suddenly paying more attention. "The guy confessed to everything. There's a chance he's looking at the death penalty. He's got nothing to lose by giving us the people above him, if there were any."  
  
"No, he's got nothing to lose that we know about," Reid reminded him, gesturing with the coffee.  
  
Chaz plucked the cup out of his hand and took a swig, before handing it back. "You know who we had working on that. What would we not know?"  
  
"That's always the question, isn't it?" Reid met Chaz's eyes, knowing they weren't talking about the tech team.  
  
"Either way, treason. Full confession. You two are national heroes." JJ pointed out.  
  
"Have you gotten the freelancers out of the parking lot, yet, Chazzie?" Hafidha smiled too sweetly from the end of the table, and Chaz let his head fall back, eyes squeezed shut, as he gestured in her direction with his third slice of cake.  
  
"This is the problem with that 'hero' thing. The legitimate press is finally leaving us mostly alone, but there's near-constant freelance photographers looking to get something they can sell. I'm... I'm a little concerned about what they might find -- not things we've done, but our collective families."  
  
"Oh, shit," Lau pronounced. "They'd take you apart."  
  
Reid looked paler,  somehow, as if the will to live were draining out of him. "I have to call my mother."  
  
"Your mom's pretty safe," JJ reminded him. "I don't think anyone can actually get to her. Your dad, on the other hand?"  
  
Reid looked like he might be ill, but his jaw tightened and his chin came up. "No, my dad might use me as a pawn, but he's not going to talk about _that_ , because it would reflect poorly on him. If they get to him, he's just going to brag about being my father, like he has anything to do with the person I am, today."  
  
"He does," Prentiss ventured, shaking her fork in Reid's direction. "Just not in any of the ways he'd like to take credit for."  
  
"I smell a story here..." Duke looked up at Reid from the other side of the table.  
  
"There is one," Reid agreed, face completely expressionless. "And it goes, 'I made a particularly terrible mistake, and then I discovered my father was exactly the man my mother always said he was. We don't speak to each other, now, not that we had before that, but for different reasons.' It's a short story, and not a very interesting one."  
  
"Is he still alive and not in prison?" Lau asked, as she tried to sneak another slice of cake and Hafidha hijacked it.  
  
"Yes, he's alive; no, he's not in prison." Reid looked at her, curiously.  
  
"Better than Villette's dad," she told him.  
  
"Agent Villette's father lived twenty-five years longer than he should have, and I say that entirely without reservation," Reid replied, the only hint of emotion on his face the way his eyes suddenly focused sharply on Lau's. "I studied that case."  
  
"He wrote a paper about that case." Chaz looked ill-impressed with the idea as he reached over with his fork and stole a bite of Reid's cake. "I like him anyway."  
  
"Should we call Frank and tell him you're stealing his boyfriend?" Rossi teased.  
  
Lau nearly drowned in her coffee, coughing and wheezing as Duke thumped her back. "Agent Reid's not a pretty girl. I don't think Frank's got anything to worry about."  
  
"Neither is Frank." JJ sipped her coffee. "We were all a little surprised."  
  
"It's not my fault you thought I was straight." Reid shrugged, raised his coffee to his mouth, stopped, looked at it, and set it on the table. Now was not the time to be caught drinking from a cup Chaz's mouth had been on. "It may have been my fault you realised I had a life outside this building that didn't entirely revolve around flying out for cases."  
  
JJ cleared her throat. "Lila."  
  
Reid stood up a little straighter. "Lila was a very attractive woman, and I was pleased to have her company as long as that lasted."  
  
Hafidha leaned toward JJ with a conspiratorial smile. "Let me guess, she broke up with him because he wouldn't put out."  
  
"JJ wouldn't know." A faint smile tugged at the corners of Reid's lips. "I don't kiss and tell."  
  
Rossi barely managed to suppress a laugh. "That's not what your neighbours say."

* * *

Mary was hesitant to imagine what the meal spread across half the flat surfaces in the room must have cost. Her... cousin had ordered the whole thing from room service, without a second thought, and, as usual, he ate like he had no regrets.  
  
What if he _was_ her brother?  
  
Obviously, the test results, so far, were wrong. She'd run them herself, and then she'd know. But, it wouldn't be that difficult to believe they were siblings. Artificial fertilisation wasn't at all uncommon in dairy farming, so their family -- his side of the family, at the very least -- would know it existed, and while it couldn't have been easy, she could see her parents asking for help and his parents suggesting it, probably offering to make sure they'd at least have a baby from the right family, even if it wasn't really their _own_.   
  
On the other hand, it was more likely, since the test was obviously screwed up, that they were really just cousins. Nothing freaky at all, aside from the part where they looked like slightly distorted mirror images of each other. And the part where they didn't look shit like anyone else in the family. Looked more like the mailman, honestly. Half the county looked like them -- just not their family.  
  
"The more of this I eat, the more I realise rich people just don't know what french fries are supposed to taste like," Langly said, suddenly, with his mouth full of potato.  
  
"Except you. You're rich."  
  
"Doesn't count. This is only like the third time I've ever eaten rich people food." Langly held up a hand as he choked down the fries. "Is it gonna bug you if I look up the property records for the farm?"  
  
Mary sat back, confusion spreading across her face as she squinted at him. "They're public records. What do I care?"  
  
"It's technically _your_ farm, now. I'm just trying to be polite." His fingers flicked casually, and he didn't mention he'd already pulled them up, before he asked. "I'm looking for the last appraisal and the condition of the house."  
  
"I haven't been in there since Aunt Helen died, but it was pretty solid, then. She paid for some work on the roof and the porch, just after Uncle Pete died. Said he wouldn't pay for it while he was alive, so she could finally get it fixed." Mary rolled her eyes and snorted. "Why?"  
  
"Because I'm thinking about buying it back from you, and I want to make sure I pay you what it's worth. I don't know what farms cost." Langly tipped his head, eyes unfocused, and reached for the tray of mini quiche balanced on the end of the coffee table. "I don't want to offer you like, Alexandria lot prices, and then find out that's insulting."  
  
"You live in DC. What do you want with an old dairy farm? You didn't even like it when you were living there." Mary grabbed the milkshake off the corner of the table with her feet and handed it to herself with a little bit of stretching.  
  
"No, I didn't like _dad_." Langly rolled his eyes. "And, yeah, the place makes my stomach roll to look at it, but I can _fix_ that. Paint it. Pull out the old wallpaper. Put in a kitchen that isn't shit. Look, is it really so weird that I want a summer home in Nebraska?"  
  
"Yes." Mary loudly sucked the milkshake through a straw.  
  
"For the first time in ... almost twenty years? I'm alive again. And that means there are people who want to make me dead, again. Still. Listen, there's people who don't even know me who want to kill me, because the orders are from people who are dead or retired, and they're _still valid_. I really pissed some people off, back in the day, and I did a lot of it doing favours for the Federal Bureau of Incompetence. The Department of Defence would like my ass on a silver platter, and I'm trying not to hand it to them." Langly shook his head and swatted aside a handful of tax assessments that were older than he needed. "I'm probably going to die. I'd rather not, but you know, shit happens when people start shooting. Almost everything I own is already committed to a cause or back into the company, if I drop dead. And Reid offered to kick my ass if I bought him a house, but that's not really going to matter if I'm dead when he gets it."  
  
"Okay, but... why not set up something locally? Or if not here, a little up the coast. You could afford Martha's Vineyard; why are you buying in Saltville?"  
  
"Because I know he knows where I came from. It's not just some random mansion neither of us have any connection to, it's the house I grew up in, however much I hated growing up there. I'd buy the house he grew up in, if I thought it wouldn't give him flashbacks, but I know _just_ enough to know better." Langly shrugged defensively. "And maybe I just want a house in the middle of nowhere so I can take a damn weekend nobody's neighbours are going to call the press about!"  
  
"If your neighbours can tell what's going on in _that_ house, you've got bigger problems than whether they call the press," Mary conceded, finally giving up on the straw.  
  
"I'm thinking about burning down the barn, though. Maybe pissing on the ashes. There will never be another cow on that land."  
  
"Pay me for it first." Mary laughed. "You can screw up the property value all you want, when you own it."


	15. Chapter 15

Chaz sat on the corner of Reid's desk as they argued over the pile of printouts between them, some shoved to the side where Reid had moved his keyboard out of the way. A few feet away, Alvez still wasn't used to seeing Reid work that closely or that comfortably with anyone, and he wondered what Villette's secret was. The man had gotten more multi-lingual bad puns and dirty jokes out of their resident genius than anyone he'd seen. Not that he'd been around long enough to judge. Maybe Reid was just finally getting his sense of humour back after however many months that was he'd spent in prison. He hadn't much known Reid before that. Maybe this was normal, and what he'd come to expect had just been the stress.  
  
But, he doubted it, judging by the reactions of the rest of the team. From what he could tell, Reid had always been quiet, smart, unassuming, and almost entirely opaque -- really he profiled a little to the left of a certain kind of revenge-driven spree killer, quiet guy, nice, everybody likes him, except the ones who live to make him uncomfortable, and they'll pay in the end. And at first, Alvez half-expected Villette would be the trigger, with the way he sat too close, drank Reid's coffee without asking, and triumphantly dragged in brain-twistingly bizarre puzzles and statistical anomalies as if challenging Reid to prove himself, again and again. But, Reid seemed to actually like the guy and appreciate the challenges. Reid watched Villette like a cat looks at another cat with a broken-winged bird between them, every time Villette showed up with a handful of paper, in one hand, and coffee or snack food in the other.  
  
Lewis was probably right. Some kind of nerd pissing contest, and one Reid clearly thought he was winning or could win.  
  
"Okay, but... you're seeing it, aren't you?" Chaz found three pages and set them next to each other, looking expectantly at Reid. They didn't always have whole conversations out loud, but there were enough words to keep anyone from looking too closely and more than enough words to ensure they were actually in agreement.  
  
"I can see the pattern," Reid agreed, sounding hesitant. He paused to pull his thoughts together. "If the focus point were anything but a hospital, I'd say you were right. Something is definitely going on, there, but I'm not sure you've got enough data to present it as an anomalous event. If they were all staying in the same hotel, if they had any connection besides being not just next of kin, but last kin, of terminally-ill patients, I'd be sure. But, this is exactly the kind of natural circumstance that leads to suicide in people who are already so inclined, which is what all of these are reported as being -- suicides. Combine that with the weather patterns in the area, and you're looking at a nasty wave of seasonal depression. I'm betting the suicide rate spiked across the affected area, not just among relatives of terminal patients."  
  
"I know you're right, and it did, but not like this. On the other hand, in a small enough sample one person's going to skew the percentages, and I know that, but there's something wrong, here. It bothers me, and it bothered the charge nurse in that unit enough that she mentioned it to the police." Chaz rubbed the bridge of his nose and sighed. "It's here. Something's here. And until I can put my finger on it, one way or another, it's going to bug the shit out of me."  
  
Reid stared at the pages. "How did this even end up in your lap?"  
  
"Somewhere out there is a woman who took one look at this and went, 'Who do I know who would know what to do with this? Oh, I know, where did I leave Agent Weird Shit's card?' I got to know Sergeant Crocker over that exploding heads case, a few years ago. The official explanation is still hollow-point bullets."  
  
"Exploding...?" Reid blinked a few times as he looked up, wondering if he was going to regret asking.  
  
"Heads." Chaz nodded. "It was one of _those_ cases. I'll sneak you the file under the table, if you're interested, but I'm not talking about it."  
  
The 'here' was implied, Reid knew. Some cases, Chaz would talk about with him, but not in front of the rest of the team. Not in front of people who didn't have any reason to know there were weirder things in the world than could be accounted for with psychoactive chemicals and Rube Goldberg-style contraptions.  
  
"Back to the--" His pocket rang, and Reid held up a finger and fished out his phone. Langly still wouldn't call him on any line that could be recorded, and his desk phone definitely was. "Do I need to be concerned?"  
  
Chaz closed his eyes and sank down through Reid's consciousness, until he could hear the other side of the conversation. He'd apologise later, but with an opening like that, it was better to be prepared.  
  
"Everything's fine," Langly promised. "There was almost a problem, but it's not going to be one, now. I'll tell you about it, later. Just calling to let you know I'm driving Mary to the airport in about an hour. You want me to stop by and bring you lunch, on the way back?"  
  
"That's not on your way back, Frank. This is nowhere near your way back from the airport, even if you're going to my place instead of yours."  
  
"Okay, fine, I just want to have lunch with my hot boyfriend, and I'm willing to brave lunch hour traffic and walk into a building full of cameras to make it happen." Langly huffed, and Reid could almost hear the eyeroll.  
  
"Make sure you bring your consultant card, or you're not getting past security. I'll call down and tell them I'm expecting you."  
  
"Please. I know how to get into the building, by now. Used to spend some time hanging out down in the basement, remember?" Langly paused. "I know what you eat. What's Sticks-and-Boner want?"  
  
"Lamb," Chaz said, before Reid could ask, and Alvez blinked at his email, wondering if he'd missed part of that conversation.  
  
"I can hear him," Langly assured Reid. "I'm thinking Indian. Give me... two hours? Maybe two and a half, if things get interesting?"  
  
"I'll call you if I have to leave town before you get here," Reid promised, thinking, not for the first time, how odd it was to have the kind of relationship he'd always associated with _Morgan_. Everyone knew, this time -- there hadn't really been a way to hide it, after the scene at his apartment -- but, for the most part, he'd stopped getting a hard time about it. Some part of him wondered if the fact he'd been found naked in the living room, with Langly in his lap, had anything to do with that. There really wasn't any way to shy away from that aspect of their relationship, neither for them, nor for anyone who'd seen them. It still made him uncomfortable, and he was intensely glad he'd managed to keep the lid on Villette, so far.  
  
Chaz offered a quick feral smile as Reid put down the phone. A handful of entirely inappropriate images flashed across their shared consciousness, and then Chaz drew back to his usual at-work awareness of Reid. "Lunch for both of us, huh?"  
  
"It's going to take a while for the task force mentality to wear off. I almost hope it doesn't. We work well, together." Reid picked up Chaz's coffee, knowing that unlike his own, there was still some in the cup. "Can't date my co-workers, can date my consultant."  
  
"Penny's consultant."  
  
"Mine now." Reid looked up just with his eyes.  
  
"Because you licked it," Chaz teased, taking back his cup before Reid could get it to his mouth. "Don't drink that. You put less sugar in yours."  
  
"Thanks, I think." Reid reflexively wiped his hands on his trousers and then reached for the pages scattered across his desk. "I need more space. I can't see enough of this at once."  
  
"I'll get more coffee," Chaz volunteered, standing up and wishing he hadn't spent as long as he had perched on the corner of that desk. He hadn't bruised from it yet, but it was probably a matter of time. "Where do I meet you?"  
  
Reid grimaced, looking around, as he stood. " _Your_ conference room. If you're right, it's one of _those_."  
  
"Wrong end of the floor." Chaz nodded, then cut the straightest possible path to the doors, easily, if barely, missing the corner of Alvez's desk.  
  
"If anyone's looking for me, I'll be down the hall," Reid announced, checking one last time for escaped pages, before he followed.

* * *

"Your security guys are hilarious," Langly said, unpacking lunch at the opposite end of the table from the inordinate amount of paper, now studded with highlighter and scribbled notes, some sheets taped to the wall. It looked a lot like his kitchen, really. "I usually come in with one of you two, so like... a little better dressed, I guess. Definitely not carrying the helmet. And one of them just flaps his mouth at me a few times and goes 'Mr Arroway! I thought you were Agent Reid's girlfriend, dressed like that!' And I start thinking this guy's a little dumb, right? Because he obviously hasn't been watching the news. So, I go, 'Reid has a girlfriend?' And he says, 'Oh, yeah, that nice-looking girl with the motorcycle who drops him off in the morning, sometimes.'"  
  
By now, Chaz was laughing into his hands.  
  
"And I go, 'Hey, Joe? Black motorcycle with neon green stripes?' And he nods at me. And I go, 'Hey, Joe? That's _me_. That's _my_ motorcycle.'" Langly finally started to laugh. "You should have seen his face. I'm lucky he unlocked the elevator, but I guess he wanted to get rid of me."  
  
Reid blinked in confusion and shook his head. "Nice-looking girl? Well, he wasn't talking about your face, with the helmet in the way."  
  
Chaz moved one hand away from his mouth, still gasping for air to cover the now-wheezing laughter, and bobbed it, tipping his head toward Langly.  
  
Reid swallowed a laugh and nearly his lips in the process. "I mean, can you blame him?"  
  
Langly looked back and forth between them. "... What?"  
  
"Not in the office," Reid decided, after a moment's pause. "I'll tell you when we get home. Mine or yours?"  
  
"You work tomorrow. Yours is closer," Langly decided, folding himself into a chair as far as possible from the paperwork, and unwrapping the garlic naan. "Do I ask, or do I play stupid?"  
  
"Pretty sure Spencer's not into stupid girls," Chaz choked out, still not quite over it, until Reid slipped the photo from Florida into the mix. The laughter stopped dead.  
  
"You done?" Langly drawled. "That's a lot of laughing for someone who thinks my cousin is hot."  
  
"I'm still stuck on Joe just... not noticing you were you." Chaz shook his head. "You've been on the news less than we have, but they got a few good shots of you _and_ the bike, that first night. Those are still being recycled every time somebody mentions you."  
  
"Yeah, I picked those. Whiskey Tango Fuckoff's been making sure only certain pictures get used. Some things have gotten lost in the ether. It's also what _I've_ been doing. We've almost got it all nailed down. Can't remove too much, or people start getting nervous. But, you can sure as hell plant enough conflicting information to keep people guessing for decades. I don't _like_ spreading misinformation, but I like people spreading _dangerous_ misinformation even less. Besides, people reading that kind of trash aren't going to be swayed by legitimate news sources, anyway. Let them get bogged down in whether you're Bat-Boy's long-lost half-mutant brother, instead of whether Reid's a fugitive from a Mexican prison break. One of these things is completely ridiculous. The other one's believable enough to cause problems."  
  
"Bat-Boy." Reid nodded solemnly, as he opened a container, checking for chicken. Chicken would most likely mean it was his, and if not, Langly would probably eat whatever was supposed to have been.  
  
"Hey, screw you, I'm the love child of Elvis and the Wolf-Man!" Chaz finally sat down, catching the container Reid slid across the table.  
  
"We'll run that one next week. This week, we pushed the one where you and Reid are actually twins, separated at birth. Photos are black and white. Nobody'll notice."  
  
Chaz looked at his arm. "Another couple of weeks, and we'll be almost the same colour. I'm still more yellow."  
  
Langly held up a finger until he finished chewing. "I've seen your ass. You're still darker than he is."  
  
"Not noticeably," Reid argued, finally finding something he recognised. "You can see it because you spent  too many years colour-matching for publication. I can see it, because it's my _job_ to notice things like that. Most people aren't going to notice. And you probably shouldn't push that one. That _will_ cause problems. Between us, at least three parents are a matter of public record, and I don't think either of us really want anyone taking a closer look."  
  
"Another few weeks, and it'll die down. The legitimate press has moved on to dismantling Helmsman, and the tabloids should follow. The problem is Special Agent Sexy over here is a little too photogenic."  
  
"Better him than you." Chaz pointed out.  
  
"More _likely_ him than you, not that I'm complaining, but you look like Brian Froud's magnum opus." Langly shrugged and reached into the bag on the floor next to him, retrieving and opening a can of Jolt with one hand.  
  
"Can't be a Gelfling. I've got--" Chaz caught himself before the word left his mouth, coughing as if he'd swallowed wrong. "I'm way too tall."  
  
"Of course not, you're a _boy_ ," Reid quoted under his breath, and Chaz kicked him under the table. "You know, it's probably a good thing we didn't know each other as children."  
  
"Because I'd have gotten you in more trouble than I got myself into?" Chaz laughed.  
  
"Because I think, between the two of us, we'd have ended up doing something very different with our lives, and probably a lot more illegal."  
  
"We'd have gotten blacklisted from a lot more casinos much sooner," Chaz decided, considering the options.  
  
Reid gave him a small smile. "We'd be buried in the desert."  
  
"You two are in a mood, today." Langly looked cautiously back and forth between them.  
  
"Cake and statistics." Chaz shrugged and leaned down the table to get his coffee.  
  
"People are very happy to have us back. Losing both of us at once was a little challenging, I gather." Reid picked at his lunch, having eaten way too much cake, that morning.  
  
"I came back to an inbox full of bullshit." Chaz took bites between sentences. "Mostly administrative garbage -- same as you, probably -- and some..." He paused and looked at Langly. "I have to look up your contract. Because some of what I've got seems like it's a lot more your thing than mine."  
  
"UFO sightings over Arizona, again?" Langly scoffed.  
  
"Some of that. Some weird-ass conspiracy shit that, under other circumstances, I'd just bin, but ... let's just say recent events have given me a new perspective on things. If there's any truth in it? _You'd_ know." Chaz shrugged again, using the motion to lift the coffee to his mouth. "What do you think, Spencer? Can we get away with letting the consultant validate some claims, to help in determining whether there's a case there?"  
  
"Anonymise the information and yes." Reid nodded staring into space as he skimmed Langly's contract on the back of his eyes. "We're consulting with him not to waste the time of our extremely busy technical analysts. Besides, despite my constant protests, he works for free."  
  
"It's not _free_ ," Langly huffed. "I'm paying tribute."  
  
Chaz watched him, waiting for the punchline.  
  
"What? I've got my priorities in order!"  
  
Reid put his face in his hands and muttered something that included the word 'prostitute'.  
  
Langly rolled his eyes. "You don't pay tribute to hookers. You pay tribute to _gods_."  
  
When Reid looked up, his glare could've melted glass. "Contextually, I'm not sure that's an improvement."  
  
Chaz raised his hand. "I am!"  
  
Langly rolled his eyes and shook his head. "I'm starting to think you just have some kind of hooker kink."  
  
As Reid sputtered in horror, Chaz caught Langly's eye. "Viva Las Vegas."  
  
"Nah, then it'd be both of you."  
  
"It _is_ both of us. My hangups on the subject are just a little sideways to his." Chaz opened another container and dropped it into the one he'd just finished.  
  
Reid waited, but Chaz didn't explain, so he kept his mouth shut. Langly _had to_ know. He'd pulled the same complete invasion of privacy on both of them; there was no way that hadn't come up. But, Langly's recollection of documents wasn't _his_ \-- it would probably occur to him in the middle of the night.  
  
"I have the feeling I just stuck my foot in something up to the knee." Langly sat up straighter, looking like he might bolt if either of them moved too fast. "Let's go back to the part where you want me to look at freaky conspiracy shit."  
  
"I'll take it apart and put it back together for you, after lunch. I have to strip the headers and contact info out." Chaz scooped rice into his mouth and then pointed at Reid with his fork, mangling words that might've been, "Tell him I'm wrong about the hospital."  
  
"Okay, so, we have a neighbourhood, and that neighbourhood has had a relatively fixed rate of suicides for the last fifteen years. Recently, there's been a spike, but the discrepancy seems to be entirely family members of terminally ill patients at a particular hospital -- the hospital being the one in that neighbourhood. That part of town features a number of hotels, and the family members seem to have been distributed among them in a predictable fashion, given the prices and the tourist trade, this time of year," Reid explained, putting down his fork and nudging the half-finished container of butter chicken away from himself. Langly reached out with his fork and pulled it over. "The argument is over whether this is an entirely explicable spike, due to the combination of unusually bleak weather and the fact that the suicides were all the _last_ members of the terminal patients' families, or whether this is serial and potentially anomalous."  
  
"Who benefits?" Langly asked. "If people are getting killed, somebody has to be getting something out of it. Obviously, it's not relatives, right? So, who benefits if these people are dead?"  
  
"See, that's the thing." Chaz hooked his foot around the leg of his chair and leaned forward. "Serial, and particularly anomalous serial, murders benefit the killer in ways that aren't usually immediately obvious, and half the time the benefit is a delusion, anyway. We're not talking about people getting killed for drugs, money, or advancement. We're talking about people getting killed because they fulfil some need the killer has to see someone like that die, whether it's building up to revenge on an actual person, to cleanse the world of 'people like that', or any number of other things. It's the type, not necessarily some quantifiable gain."  
  
"So, we've got a victim profile, and no idea whether these people are actually victims, and if they are, _why_." Reid leaned back, dropping his hands into his lap. "Without some kind of evidence that at least one of these isn't a suicide, I can't say this isn't a truly unfortunate seasonally-inspired _coincidence_."  
  
"Kick up the security on the hotels," Langly suggested. "If somebody's in town to see their dying relative, the hospital probably knows where they're staying, because they'd have to be able to call if anything happens. Even if the hotel doesn't know why someone's in town, the hospital will. Set something up for just a couple of weeks, where there's more security on those rooms. Hell, talk the hotels into offering 'special accommodations' if someone's in town to visit a relative in the hospital, so they can keep all the rooms close together and spend less watching them. Suicides aren't good for business, and you can sell it to them on that."  
  
"It's not our case, yet," Reid reminded him. "Technically, it's not a case, at all."  
  
"I'll call Crocker and suggest they lean on the hotels," Chaz volunteered. "Maybe they can spare a few officers, but I'm hesitant to put too much faith in that."  
  
"There's definitely something wrong, I'm just hesitant to call it _murder_ ," Reid said, shaking his head. "I can't even call it 'unexplained deaths', because the M.E. already ruled them suicides. We need a lot more information about what these people were doing, before they died, before we can even put forth that they were driven to suicide by some external influence, and we're not going to get that information, because we can't call this a case, until we have evidence that a crime has been committed."  
  
Langly stared expectantly at Reid for a long moment and then slowly pointed at himself. "I'll do it. Give me the names. I can run electronic surveillance records and credit cards faster than Penny."  
  
"As tribute," Chaz said, eyes sparkling as he nodded at Reid, "to the god of fuck."  
  
Reid slid down in his chair and Chaz's eyes widened as he tried to jump out of his seat. Langly couldn't make out quite what happened, but Chaz and the chair both went down in a heap, and Reid sat back up as if nothing had happened.  
  
"Ow, _shit_ ," Chaz complained from the floor, as the door opened, and Falkner looked in, cautiously curious.  
  
"Gentlemen?"  
  
Langly turned a wide-eyed serious look on Falkner and pointed at Chaz. "You should really get that chair fixed. Someone could get hurt."


	16. Chapter 16

"Miss me?" Langly purred, pulling the blanket across his shoulders as he adjusted the way he knelt across Reid's lap, the chair vibrating under them.  
  
"Far more often than is reasonable." Reid reached up and tucked Langly's hair back behind his ear, to get it out of his own face. "I remain entirely infatuated with you, and I hope the relationship survives it wearing off."  
  
"Worried I'm going to be too much of a pain in the ass to stand, someday?" Langly teased, pressing a kiss to Reid's forehead. "I'm not gonna be offended. Everybody gets there eventually."  
  
"I hope that I don't. I want this to last." Reid traced the sharp line of Langly's cheek with his fingertips. "I know I can't offer you most people's definition of 'happily ever after'. I like living alone. I don't come home for weeks at a time. My family line _should_ stop with me, and you _know_ why. But, I don't think you want the things I can't give you. Am I wrong?"  
  
"Shit, no, you're not wrong." Langly sat back just enough to actually focus on Reid's face. "You okay?"  
  
Reid nodded, his hands settling on Langly's thighs. "It's not me; it's Chaz. I know he'll be all right, but we're close enough that I find myself questioning my own assumptions, noticing things I've started to take for granted. And I shouldn't take you for granted. I shouldn't get too used to you. I'll forget how to be surprised by you, and then where will we be?"  
  
"Ask Byers," Langly joked, tugging the blanket up again, to try to stop quite as much heat from escaping from the space between them. "Every now and again, he thinks he's seen everything, and he's known me a lot longer."  
  
"I don't think he has quite the same appreciation of you."  
  
"Just means it won't take you as long to find new things you like. Or... _don't_ like..."  
  
"Even when I don't like things, we've worked it out." A small smile curved Reid's lips. "And thank you again for the windows. We'd be freezing, without them, even with the blanket."  
  
"Remind me why you live here?"  
  
"I like it." Reid smiled a little wider. "And I've been here too long to give it up, now."  
  
"Whatever happens, it's yours," Langly promised. "I'm not that kind of asshole."  
  
"Just one of the multitude of things I appreciate about you." Reid traced circles on Langly's inner thighs with his thumbs.  
  
"You want me to give you something else to appreciate?" Langly purred, looking pointedly down at Reid's hands and then back up to his face. "Maybe up against the windows we haven't had a chance to try out?"  
  
"It's dark outside," Reid pointed out, tipping the chair forward just enough to glance over at the windows between his shoulder and Langly's. "We're going to have to kill _all_ the lights in here. And it can't be flat up against the glass, either, because that'll show through."  
  
"You going to be okay without the lights?"  
  
"There's enough light outside." Reid wrapped his hands around Langly's hips feeling the bone against his palms. "Promise me if this goes wrong, no one gets out of here with photos."  
  
"As far as I know, they're all shooting digital, so I'm just going to incapacitate anything I find in range, before it matters." Langly leaned in closer and pulled the blanket until he could tuck the corners behind Reid's shoulders. "Keep me warm. I'll just be a minute."  
  
"How warm?"  
  
"Warm enough to make it to the window still ready to make your dream come true."

* * *

Despite her intentions, Mary had gotten the samples onto the plane as checked baggage, with nearly no eyebrows raised. The clerk at the counter had told her a story of an anthropologist flying with fossilized monkey bones and double-checked the security of the case, before waving her along. She'd been half-certain the samples would be missing, when she landed, but the steel case was undamaged, still marked with the same stickers the clerk had put on it in DC.  
  
The longer tests would be running all night and for a day or two to come, but the shortest possible comparison only took a few hours. She stared at the screen and didn't like what she saw. The longer tests would have it out, but they'd provide the same results the other lab had gotten, or close enough to draw the same conclusions. Had to be they were both just Uncle Pete's kids. Had to be. Except the match was going to be too close for that.  
  
She didn't like this. She'd taken those samples herself. She'd drawn the blood from the bottom of his foot, which he definitely hadn't been expecting. There was no way the samples were faked. Not hers, for sure, and not his, either. Even if he'd slipped something under his skin, it wouldn't have been _there_ , and she'd have felt it. She'd been checking, just in case.  
  
Three times, the tests had been run, and all three times, they came up the same -- or they would, if the preliminary she was looking at was accurate. Now, the hard questions remained: who the hell's kids were they, and _how_? The first live birth from an implanted embryo had been _after_ she was born, to say nothing about Dick. She could've been another research team working on a similar project to the ones who'd published, but they didn't want to commit, when they'd obviously damaged the embryo, somehow. A stretch, maybe, but she'd known people who would do that, she worked with people who would do that -- bury the times they screwed up the procedure and publish when they got it right. It was just that none of them were working on projects involving living humans. It wasn't particularly unethical to throw out the times you screwed up, without comment, if you were just working with bacteria, and none of your screwups involved the possibility of infection. But, when you got into human subjects, you couldn't just wipe up the mess without reporting it to _someone_.  
  
But, Dick? Dick was _way_ too old for this kind of thing. If he'd been the initial success, there'd have been a paper. There'd have been more testing _sooner_ , at the very least -- the idea that it was possible would've taken hold, at least with whoever funded the project in the first place. So, how the hell had this happened?  
  
If she stepped off into super weirdo land, with the conspiracy theorists who had no idea what order science happened in, if she drew a path that led to the smallest number of fucked up places, she kept coming back to one story she could almost believe. Aunt Helen was going to have twins, but for some reason had one twin removed and frozen? Nineteen sixty-eight. Was that possible in sixty-eight? The rats were in the fifties, she thought, so probably. So, for whatever reason, Aunt Helen didn't have twins, and she was the other twin, donated to her parents about fifteen years later, presumably because they were having trouble having their own kid. But, who the hell would've performed the procedure before eighty-four? Who the hell would've stored half a set of twins for fifteen years, in conditions that led to relatively successful implantation, later? At least she was pretty sure why nobody told her. The procedure was probably a terrible embarrassment to her parents. Her family was just _like that_.  
  
Grave-robbing or talking to her parents, next? Grave-robbing sounded easier. Way less traumatic. Well, for her, anyway. She wasn't sure how Dick would hold up to decade-buried, mostly-decomposed corpses. Particularly his _parents_. But, she'd promised to invite him, so she'd wait for the tests to finish and then send a message to Dick. Well, to _Chaz_ , probably.  
  
She took her glasses off and rubbed her eyes. What was she going to do with _that_ mess? She liked him. He was really pretty hot. And Dick said he was great in bed, which was exactly the problem. Maybe he had a twin b-- and that was Spencer. And that was _worse_. His sister was cute, though. Maybe she'd see if that would go anywhere, after a few reassurances she hadn't yet been licked. But, Hafidha lived with Chaz, and that would just be twisting the knife.  
  
One problem at a time: grave-robbing, selling the farm, and then she'd figure out what to do with Chaz. Maybe he'd have moved on, by then.

* * *

Reid had his forearm braced against the window, his head resting on it, and Langly's hands all over his body, lips and tongue across his shoulders and the back of his neck. And he wanted to want this, wanted it so badly he could taste the dream against his tongue, as he panted, worried about the mist on the glass. But, he couldn't lose himself in it. It was Langly behind him, but still _behind_ him. The alley below was washed in light, and even though he knew he was in the dark behind a mirror, the thought that anyone could walk by and look up was distressing.  
  
"New plan," he panted, as Langly's hand finally slid down between his thighs.  
  
"Not working for you, huh?" Langly let go and stepped to the side, remembering how entirely freaked the hell out Reid got about anyone touching him from behind.  
  
"Too much." Reid shook his head and stepped back from the glass, covering himself with his hands. "Too many places this could go wrong."  
  
"Okay, so... new plan?"  
  
Reid turned to examine the room. After a brief pause, he strode across it, easily dodging furniture, and returned with one of the chairs from what would've been the kitchen table, if it were in the kitchen. He set it down, back facing the window, and gestured for Langly to sit, stretching back for the blanket they'd left piled on the floor.  
  
A smile crossed Langly's face as he figured out where this was going, and he settled into the chair, edging it back until it met the window, so that it wouldn't tip when he slid down in it to give Reid a better angle.  
  
"Better," Reid decided, lowering himself into Langly's lap and draping the blanket around them. "Warmer, I can see you, and I can still look out the window. If anyone can see in, they'll get the back of a chair and an eyeful of blanket."  
  
"Pretty into you seeing me," Langly admitted, sliding his hands up Reid's thighs. "Pretty into the way you look at me. Pretty into the way you _want_ me. Nobody else looks at me like you do."  
  
"Except Byers." Reid ran a hand down Langly's chest, wondering how long it would take for him to stop looking quite so thin, wondering if he would, with the way he kept pushing himself.  
  
"Byers!?" Langly tipped his head back and laughed, hair sticking to the misted window. "Are you kidding me? He looks at me like he's afraid I'm going to tell him 'no', right up until he's afraid I'm going to tell him 'yes'. _You_ look at me like you know what you want and you're looking right at it. From anybody else, that would probably be a really bad sign, but I almost always _like_ what you want."  
  
"Do you like what I want right now?" Reid breathed against Langly's neck, between kisses.  
  
"I have absolutely no doubt in my mind I'm gonna to love every second of it." Langly tugged at Reid's hips. "Here, move a little closer..."

* * *

"What's happening to us?" Byers asked, coffee in hand, as he leaned against Frohike's desk.  
  
"What do you mean? We're rich, we're still dead, and Langly's got an inside line on the Federal Bucket of Idiots Weird Shit Division. We're exactly where we want to be, and we have the kind of leverage Mulder could never manage, after they sent him to the basement." Frohike changed another word in the article he was editing. "You've got a smart girlfriend and a smart daughter -- that's it, isn't it? Penny's not Susanne."  
  
"For once, it's not about Susanne. I have concerns about Dr Langly. I have concerns about _our_ Langly." Byers stared into his cup. "This is going to be like Scully, all over again. We're too old for this."  
  
"Langly doesn't think he is." Frohike scrolled up, re-reading the sentence. "Of course, he's younger than us, anyway."  
  
" _Langly_ is going to get himself killed," Byers snapped, suddenly no longer leaning against the desk. "We know better than to let Langly deal with people, unless we're trying to start a riot."  
  
Frohike tipped his chair back and looked up. "So that's what this is. You've been our face for thirty years, and now Langly's out in public, hobnobbing with the feds and pretending to be a respectable businessman. And, you know what? If you'd told me this was going to happen last year? I wouldn't have believed a word of it. Because you're right. We don't put Langly in front of people unless we want to piss them off. Except for some reason we've got two feds from two different units, and they think he's _cute_ when he does that."  
  
"ACTF's still BAU," Byers corrected. "They're just the BAU for cryptids."  
  
"Point still stands -- Langly has gotten us back into bed with the Bureau, and himself very literally in bed with two agents. If it gets us what we need, if it gets us people who are willing to listen to all the shit Mulder couldn't do anything about, twenty years ago, I'm not sure we've got business complaining. And right now, the wonder twins are America's favourite people, and if West gets sentenced like he deserves, they're going to have whatever the hell they want, if they say there's a case. We finally took down Overlord's baby, and they're the faces on the news for it -- and they know damn well they couldn't have done it without us." Frohike rocked the chair back forward. "Grab the reins, Byers, because we're back in the saddle, and this time we're not riding off into the sunset. You scan all that crap we got back from Susanne?"  
  
"Not yet." Byers perched on the edge of the desk again. "I'm glad we have it, but I'm not sure I want to see it again. I'm not sure I want to remember what we went through to get most of that stuff."  
  
"So don't read it. Just pull it and pop the staples out and drop it in the auto-feed. We can care what's in it after the OCR finishes." Frohike made a disgruntled sound and tweaked the leading on a paragraph.  
  
"You think you remember something, don't you."  
  
"I think I want everything we know about Scully and her kid and Mulder's sister, before we go charging in after dear Doctor Mary."

* * *

Reid's breath stuttered as he writhed against Langly's body, the wet heat between them coiling against his neck, at every motion, the taste of sweat and lust heavy in his mouth, as he pressed himself even closer, determined to touch as much of Langly's skin as he could. One of Langly's hands splayed across the back of his hips, fingers pressing to either side of his spine just hard enough to tease. A desperate, frustrated sound wrenched out of him as he ground harder against the slick, wet skin between Langly's hips.  
  
"Yeah?" Langly panted, blowing Reid's hair out of his face. "Still?"  
  
Reid swallowed to find enough spit to make words. " _Please_."  
  
Langly's fingers pressed in just a little harder, and Reid arched. The ends of his own fingers felt like ice had bloomed around the tips, sending spiralling vines of electricity around his bones to his wrist. And as the fingers of Langly's other hand flicked across his nipple, Reid realised he no longer cared that they were framed in the window. The room was dark, but for the light from outside, the light that cast stark shadows across Langly. He'd have to ask later if Langly had managed any pictures, because he wondered how brightly his own face was lit, facing the window, as he was. But, later, because right that moment, there were other far more important things to consider, like the tension in his thighs and the way his skin seemed to twitch at every motion of air, blanket, or hand across it.  
  
"More," Reid demanded breathlessly, panting the word against Langly's ear. "Harder. _Please_."  
  
"Tell me," Langly breathed, as Reid shivered against him, the sensation like lightning under his skin, at once too much and not nearly enough.  
  
"I want you. I don't care if they wind up with photos. You're incredible, and I love you, and I want you, and right now, I don't care who finds out. Let them print my face begging for your touch. I'm in my own home with the man I love. And I do. I do love you. Even when you're not about to make me--" A wordless sound poured out of Reid's mouth, from low in his chest, followed by more barely-coherent pleading.  
  
As Reid shuddered against him, one foot hooked around his ankle, Langly thought he'd be happy if the moment never ended. He wanted to climb out of his skin at the sweat and the heat and the pressure against his skin, but he'd missed this, missed Reid coming apart in his arms, coming all over him, if the pulse against his belly was any sign. From wet to wetter, and Reid might mind, in a minute, but _he_ didn't.  
  
Reid swallowed, trying to catch his breath. "Remind me to wash this window, before we go to bed."  
  
"You just wiped a handful of spooge on it, didn't you."  
  
"That is absolutely possible, but I decline to commit."  
  
Langly patted Reid's thigh. "Okay, you have to stop leaning on me or I'm going to spontaneously combust."  
  
Reid whined pitifully, but sat up, twisting to look over his shoulder. "I can't find your shirt."  
  
"It's on your desk chair, I think." Langly tried and failed to look innocent. "And my ass has been asleep for the last ten minutes."  
  
"Okay, shower first, then I'll clean this up, and then we can go to-- I was going to say 'bed', but... chair. The good chair."  
  
"Hey, any time you want a bed, say the word. The core renovations are done, next door. Kitchen's not big, but it's big enough for me and Villette not to kill each other, and the bedroom's now a nice, big bathroom. All that's left is the main room and the second door, and those are totally up to you."  
  
Reid tipped his head and thought about it. He could convince himself it wasn't really about him -- Byers owned the building. If he moved out, this would probably become the _building manager's_ apartment, and he was just helping to design for the future, and maybe getting some use out of it. It was bullshit, but he could probably sell himself on the point. "I might take you up on that. I mean, I got shot in the back. I'm probably supposed to stop sleeping in chairs, so much."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One! More! Chapter!
> 
> [=EDIT=] One fairly serious edit, ten hours late, because I was Too Tired To Brain.


	17. Chapter 17

Not for the first time, Hafidha wondered if Chaz didn't have some sort of yet-unrealised power for atmospheric weather conditions, because it was just a little too early to be snowing, but he was out on the back patio, sprawled in one of the deck chairs, staring up into the flurries, and currently listening to The Smiths. She could always tell it was bad when he reached for The Smiths.  
  
The sensible thing to do would be to microwave some leftovers and go back upstairs, but she wasn't really feeling sensible. When she went for the beer, there was none, and that was the second warning to just let him freeze his ass off, until he came to his senses. Instead, she threw together a plate of cheese and sausage, grabbed two strawberry protein shakes and the bottle of vodka, and slipped some Birthday Massacre into his playlist.  
  
He squinted at her with one eye, raising the beer in his hand to his mouth, as the door slid open, and made no move to take off the headphones. "I mean this in the nicest way possible, but fuck off."  
  
"Got a tear in your beer, 'cause you're crying for her rear?" Hafidha drawled, pulling over the little square table, its tiled top dusted with snow, so she could empty her hands onto it. "Eat something before you drop dead. I'm here to save you from your worst enemy: _you_."  
  
When he heard the next track start with synthetic glass chimes, instead of the bassline he was expecting, Chaz opened his other eye for a warning glare. "Hafs, leave it."  
  
"Chazzie, sweet boy, you have to work tomorrow. You're going to hate everything if you go in hung over."  
  
"Which is why you brought the vodka." Chaz pulled the iPod out of his pocket and skipped the track, leaving it when he hit the Sisters.  
  
"Screw you, the vodka's so I can catch up. If I drink enough, maybe I'll understand you." Hafidha opened one of the protein drinks, took a swig, topped it off with vodka, and shook it.  
  
"I am really not in the mood." Chaz shifted uncomfortably, realising this song made him think of Reid, and that this was not a way he _ever_ wanted to think of Reid. They were much too close.  
  
"Then come inside before you pass out and freeze to death."  
  
"Thought I might just skip the hangover and cut straight to it. There's a joke in here about chilling out, but I'm pretty sure this is my fifth beer, and I can't find it."  
  
"Charles. You cannot kill yourself over some girl." Hafidha kicked the leg of his chair.  
  
"It's not really about the girl." Chaz let his head fall back again, staring up into the dizzying snow. "But, she made me stop and look at myself, and I don't like what I see. Haven't liked it in a long time, but you slap on a little paint and a handful of good deeds, and it's ignorable. I just don't think I'm in a position to ignore it any more. How much of themselves can a single person be expected to sacrifice for the good of others? I can't keep doing this. Everything I wanted in life has been slapped out of my hands and stepped on, and you know I'm not talking about _women_. _Everything_. And there's only so much I can fix. There's only so much I can undo. And it just keeps falling apart, again and again."  
  
"Reyes, then, not the girl." Hafidha nodded and sat down on the arm of the chair, loudly eating crackers, to remind him the food was there.  
  
"Reyes has the moral centre of a house-trained lizard," Chaz snapped, and the track skipped. It took him a second to recognise the replacement. "Shelf Life? _Really_?"  
  
"How much more of this bullshit can you take," Hafidha sang, taking a swig of spiked protein drink.  
  
"Not much. I'm tired, and I hurt all the time, and I don't want to do this any more."  
  
"You hurt because it's cold. You know what that's doing to your arms." Hafidha wrapped a hand around his wrist, trying to offer some semblance of warmth. "Besides, you've been through worse, and so have I."  
  
"That is exactly the point. I have been. And I will be, again. It never fucking stops. And I just-- Is it even worth it, any more?" Chaz sighed, blinking away the melting snow stuck to his eyelashes. "I don't want to kill myself. I just want to stop living. Maybe I just want to stop living _like this_. But, I keep trying, and it never works. I'm me, and there's nothing I can do about it."  
  
"Chazzie, listen. Maybe you haven't found the girl of your dreams. Maybe you're not going to have two point five kids and a white picket fence, and we both know _all_ the reasons for that. Maybe the job sucks and neither of us is technically allowed to quit, because fuck Reyes with a glittery pink kazoo. But, there is definitely a hole, there, and you're climbing out of it. When you were twelve, did you think you were going to be a national hero? That you'd basically become one of the X-Men, save your friends, save yourself, save the country? Did you ever stop to wonder if you'd have not just one but _two_ boyfriends, who are both pretty smart and pretty cute, while your poor, dear adopted sister remains a solitary figure in the night?"  
  
"They're not my boyfriends. I'm an extremely expensive sex toy."  
  
"They love you."  
  
"Love?" A sharp laugh startled out of Chaz. "No. I-- No. Spencer's in love with L-- with _Frank_. I know what that looks like. I know what that _feels_ like. He's so happy, it _hurts_. And he's terrified, but some part of me's just like at least he has something to be terrified about. He's afraid of loss, because he has something to lose. No, that makes me sound like an asshole. But, I am an asshole, so I shouldn't be surprised. In theory."  
  
"I didn't say they're _in_ love with you. I said they love you. Like I love you. Like Daphs loved you. But, with _way_ more sex. Which, you're cute, but you're not _that_ cute."  
  
Chaz curled forward so fast he nearly knocked Hafidha off the arm of the chair, and she pulled the table out of the way, suddenly sure he was going to barf, but it didn't happen.  
  
"Don't. Don't bring Daphs into this. Just don't." The rest of the beer poured into the barely-stuck snow, as Chaz clung to his own sides as if trying to hold his guts in. "All of you. All of you mattered, but she was too far. I couldn't get to her. I could bring you all home, but I couldn't get to her. I made a choice, and she died."  
  
This was new. Of all the things Chaz had said, all the things he'd cried about, when Daphne died, he'd never blamed himself _like this_. Oh, he'd blamed himself, but differently.  
  
"Chazzie? What are you talking about? _None_ of us knew, yet. It's not your fault."  
  
He relaxed in that way that said he knew he'd said something he shouldn't have, and his breathing slowed. "Nightmares."  
  
"It's just the Bug. You drunk enough not to dream?" Hafidha scratched the middle of his back, away from the scars.  
  
"Fucked if I know," Chaz muttered against his knees, finally getting a look at one of Hafidha's slippered feet. "What the hell are you wearing?"  
  
"Pyjamas. I came down to get something to eat, before I went to bed."  
  
"It's too cold for that. You should go in."  
  
Hafidha laughed. "Says the man without a jacket, who's been sitting out here for the better part of five beers. If I'm going in, you're coming with me."  
  
"It's the Bug," he said, quietly, as if turning the idea over to see if it fit.  
  
"Yeah. It's the Bug." Hafidha nudged him. "You knew this was coming. You've been pissing it off for months. Come back inside, finish my drink, and go to bed. I'll call you in, tomorrow. Twenty-four hour stomach flu."  
  
"I'm going to work," Chaz insisted, inching toward the edge of the seat without actually sitting up. "The Anomaly doesn't get to start shit with me on work nights. I'm not teaching it that it can win."  
  
"I'm driving."  
  
"The hell you are. It's _my_ car."  
  
"You, my sweet boy, are probably still going to be legally _drunk_ , in the morning." Hafidha bumped him in the side of the head with the spiked protein drink, until he took it from her.  
  
"Is there still a half-gallon of triple fudge in the freezer?" Chaz finally half sat up, elbows on his knees.  
  
"Unless _you_ ate it."  
  
"Not yet. I probably should." He stood with far more grace than a man should, after that many beers in rapid succession. "Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, strawberry, and vodka. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll sleep through."  
  
"I'm bugging the fucking door," Hafidha warned, picking up the plate and following him into the house. "If you open it before we leave for work, I'm coming down here and kicking your ass. Just so we're clear. And then I'm calling you in with a broken ass. I'll say it to Duke. Watch me."  
  
"Thank you, I prefer my ass and my reputation intact."  
  
"Your _reputation_ , I'll believe..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No sooner does one problem get solved than another takes its place! Can't these poor bastards catch a break? FIND OUT NEXT FIC, when something _definitely_ breaks...


End file.
